


Oak and Mistletoe

by voidwaren



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Hanahaki Disease, M/M, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Magical Tattoos, Mild Language, Minor Allison Argent/Isaac Lahey, Minor Allison Argent/Isaac Lahey/Scott McCall, Minor Allison Argent/Scott McCall, Minor Cora Hale/Lydia Martin, Minor Isaac Lahey/Scott McCall, Minor Lydia Martin/Jackson Whittemore, Minor Vernon Boyd/Erica Reyes, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Slow Burn, Temporary Character Death, Witch Curses
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-16
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:47:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 27,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25319314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voidwaren/pseuds/voidwaren
Summary: “What the hell is that, Stilinksi?” Coach asked in that pained way he sometimes did, sounding exactly like he didn’t sign up for this and the inquiry was only a byproduct of his job integrity.Scott looked at Stiles in horror, but Stiles barely noticed. He was too busy staring at the mess he’d made on the floor, his mind racing with the wonder of, firstly, just what exactly he’d gotten himself into this time and, secondly, just how long exactly it would take to kill him.Because on the floor of the locker room, coated in blood, was a single flower petal.-It starts with a witch on a rainy night. Add in a curse of the dying, a year of rebuilding the burnt out shell of the Hale house, and a bloodied petal on the floor of the boy’s locker room, and you have one hell of a twist of fate Stiles Stilinski most certainly did not sign up for.Magic, unfortunately, included.
Relationships: Derek Hale/Stiles Stilinski, Minor or Background Relationship(s), Stiles Stilinski & The Pack
Comments: 24
Kudos: 197





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was supposed to be a Hanahaki prompt. Naturally, I went overboard. There’s still Hanahaki if you, like, squint. Heavily. The entire time.
> 
> (Kidding, it’s definitely still there. It’s just… MORE.)
> 
> Fair warning, too: despite the nature of the Hanahaki trope, romance isn’t exactly the focal point of this fic. I kind of took the idea and messed around with it. Sorry if you came for smooches! They have to get there first.
> 
> Also, mind the tags, they’re likely to change as I continue with this. I'm starting with a Mature rating because I know it'll get a little grisly, but I'm not totally sure how much just yet.
> 
> (I will probably be slow updating. I'm a slow writer to start, for one, and for another, the pandemic is brutal on the mental health. Apologies in advance!)

Stiles had never been one for flowers.

They reminded him too much of things he’d rather forget. Of times when he was useless or weak, when he wasn’t the kind of the person he needed to be to keep the ones he loved alive. They reminded him of pain and regret. Ruined prom dresses and cold caskets. They reminded him of his mother’s death, and of Lydia’s blood seeping into the earth, shiny pink fabric hanging from her broken body in tatters. To him, they were nothing but a reminder of a burning guilt that never seemed to fade, even with the time they all said it would take to let go.

Flowers were never exactly his thing, and, the older he got, the more he resented the idea of the physical sentiment. It never stopped him from picking up a bouquet for the people he knew would appreciate them—Lydia and Allison on their birthdays, Cora when she finally came back to town, Mrs. McCall on Mother’s Day, because she never let him forget she was there for him in ways she knew his father couldn’t quite be. Isaac that one time he won the entire lacrosse game all on his own—Scott had blown the game by accident while chasing down a false lead and Stiles had never exactly been made for anything but warming the bench—because Isaac liked to be appreciated, and Stiles was fully aware of the neglect Isaac had suffered from in that area growing up. He’d buy them for Erica, but he knew she’d just laugh in his face. He always got her food instead—they were kindred spirits in that sense. Flowers just made them gag, where a decent order of curly fries could make their entire week.

So, naturally, it would be flowers that an angry witch would cast upon him, and it would take a year for the curse to come into effect.

It had been a rainy, cold night the night they’d ambushed a certain coven looking to hunt down Derek, Cora, and Peter, and then all the others once it was realized there were more than just three to the name of the werewolf pack in Beacon Hills. A full moon, because werewolf blood on the night of a full moon had an array of properties to it that Stiles had not listened to a word of when Deaton had tried his best to explain before said werewolves lost their shit for the night. It wouldn’t have happened like that at all had the witches not managed to entice them into shifting with an attack, the pull of the moon too much to keep a total check on themselves, but they had, and it did.

And, as seven-odd werewolves of the two line-blurred packs (thanks, Isaac, for being so torn) ravaged the woodlands around them, Stiles, Allison, Deaton, and Lydia set into motion a plan to defeat all the witches. They had fumbled a bit on their mark, with them later learning that the coven leader had gotten her hands on a particularly old charm of some kind, relating back to fifth or sixth century wizardry or something like that (again, Stiles hadn’t been paying the most attention when the new details had been loosed—he’d been too damn tired and cold and sore after it all had been said and done) and amped up on the power it contained, but, with Allison’s spectacular marksmanship and Lydia’s strange ability to anticipate the witches’ next moves, Stiles and Allison together managed to take down every member of the coven with her bow and his bat, and then finally cornered the leader in a grungy, slime-ridden section of a back alley, pinned to the brick by Allison’s silver-tipped arrows and snarling at them with all she had.

They were lucky it was raining so hard, Stiles would think in retrospect, because they were a powerful strain of witches, and the leader had a perchance for lobbing sparky flames at them when they got too close. The rain helped keep them from getting singed. It did not, however, stop Stiles from getting stabbed by her, both him and Allison realizing too late that her hand had not been as pinned as they’d thought.

Stiles yelped, stumbling away from the witch and yanking the offending object out as he landed hard on the ground, only to find it had been the point of a flower pendant attached to a chain, both now wet with his blood.

“ _Maledictus florum,_ ” the witch howled, her eyes on Stiles even as Allison wrenched an arrow coated in mountain ash and cored with bloodstone from her quiver and pulled her arm back, ready to stab it straight into the witch’s heart. “ _Maledicam tibi cum floribus_. Peonies for your hurt, larkspur for your suffering. Anemone forsaken. Carnations and lavender and lilies growing in your veins. The love will be for naught, and you will bleed petals through it all. Your death will come in the bloom of yearning, and you will _choke_ on it.”

And then Allison had driven the arrow deep into her chest, and the witch had promptly burst into flames. From somewhere in the distance, a chorus of wolves—werewolves, _their_ wolves—howled into the night.

Stiles had only looked at Allison over the ashes of what was left after the fire had stopped, his hand clutching at the bleeding wound above his collarbone, but his confusion was mirrored back at him on her face. She helped him back to his feet, and together they made their way to the veterinary clinic, where Deaton and Lydia were waiting. When they told Deaton about what the witch had said, though, he hadn’t known either what she’d done, and it had been forgotten when graduation loomed on the horizon and all they had worried about suddenly paled in the face of their inevitable future. Deaton had kept the flower necklace, the wound had healed, and, like the creatures of quick change they had been forced to become, they all moved their attentions on.

Stiles would move on, and, with the exception of the scar that now marred the skin above his left collarbone to remind him on the days he bothered to look, nothing would happen to remind him of a curse he couldn’t have named if he tried. A curse that would lie in waiting within him, brought into existence by the last words of a witch with a single death wish, sleeping until all the requirements would be met. And, unfortunately for Stiles, met they would be.

It would come into effect almost a year later, halfway through their final school semester, and it would come in the form of a white petal coated in blood on the floor of the boy’s locker room. But, to get to that point, Stiles would first have to lose a piece of who he thought he had always been, and that loss would first begin on a hot day just before his senior year would begin, among the ashes of a building he really, honestly and truly, would not mind never seeing again.

And the catalyst for that loss would come in the form of Derek Hale.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took a second to get out. This chapter and chapter three were actually one chapter before I realized how long it was getting (and I’m still not done) and decided I needed to split it up. 
> 
> I’m trying to keep the chapters from being 10k chunks, which is a bad habit I’ve developed, so I’m really sorry if it flows a little weird as I split things up to make each chapter more digestible. My chapter outline said [Van Buren voice] "Byeeeeeee!"

“Scott, if you smack me in the the head with that beam _one more time_ ,” Derek growled, then twisted spectacularly at the waist to grab said beam from where it sat on Scott’s shoulder just as he was turning back again to see why Derek was yelling at him, the earbuds crammed into his ears sealing his fate before he even knew what it was he’d done. The beam splintered between Derek’s fingers where he held it aloft, and Scott blinked in bafflement as Stiles and Erica started laughing, loudly, from their position on the charred floor, where they were tearing out old shards of burnt wood that couldn’t be salvaged. Scott looked over at them, pulling one earbud out, and the white cord connecting the bastards to his phone immediately tried its best to get tangled up in itself.

“What happened?” Isaac asked before Scott could, appearing from one of the other rooms, where he and Boyd were measuring for new floors.

“Scott’s going to give Derek a concussion by the time we’re done here,” Erica explained gleefully. Derek dropped the ruined beam and glowered at her.

“Or an aneurysm,” Stiles tacked on helpfully, and the glower was switched onto him and sharpened into an annoyed glare.

Isaac looked to Scott, who only shrugged. “Derek jacked the wood,” he explained simply. “I don’t know what I did.”

“Uttered that sentence without an ounce of awareness is what you did,” Erica muttered, and Stiles grumbled a “Jesus, Scott,” and then started laughing again. Erica grinned at him, even as everyone in the skeletal remains of the main room of the Hale house—Boyd included, because he’d just appeared in the doorway behind Isaac to see what was going on—looked at Stiles like they weren’t quite sure how he got invited to the ordeal.

Derek huffed a loud sigh, effectively shoving Stiles and his laughter into a metaphorical corner. “Scott,” he started, sounding done with it all despite having only been at it for an hour and a half at most, “go help Isaac and Boyd with the floors. I’ll handle the beams.”

Scott glowered at him, and, though it held a fraction of the power Derek’s perfectly-practiced glower had, it had a shocking resemblance to the one Derek had just executed on his female beta and the human sitting beside her. “You can’t order me around, you know. I’m my own alpha now.”

Derek raised a single eyebrow. “Is that why you’re here helping me rebuild my house with _my_ pack?” he asked.

“Stiles is mine, and Isaac is—”

“Don’t bring me into this!” Isaac called from a room over, where he’d disappeared back into the moment Derek had put his attention onto Scott.

“My house, my pack, and yet you’re still here. Go,” Derek outright ordered, sounding a whole lot like he did that one time he slammed Stiles’ head against his steering wheel for using him to get Danny to comply. “Help them measure, I’ll handle the unloading.” When Scott didn’t move, Derek tacked on a surprisingly compliant, “Please.”

And, while he didn’t necessarily look happy about it, Scott trudged off to the side room—whatever it was supposed to be originally, Stiles didn’t know, because everything was burnt beyond recognition and only the kitchen and main entryway were identifiable without furniture—leaving Derek to haul the new wood in from the small stack in the yard and Stiles and Erica to return to their excavation. Being the dead of summer, didn’t take long for the situation to become completely unbearable.

They’d started that morning early, much earlier than Stiles would have liked and would have refused to show up for had Derek not, surprisingly politely, asked Scott and Stiles to help out with the reconstruction of his family home while Peter and Cora were away in South America on the days they didn’t have to be up just as early for summer lacrosse practice. Stiles might still have refused, because his weekends were the only times he got to sleep-in past four in the morning, but then Erica had demanded Derek buy them food in exchange for the help, and Stiles was never one to say no to free fast food. Especially not when he was also trying to keep his dad on a stricter diet over the summer when all of the bakeries were offering annoyingly persistent doughnut deals and healthy food for his dad meant healthy food for him, too.

Fast food he could consume without feeling bad his dad had to sit there with his salad and wish he could be eating fast food, too? Always a win. Stiles was in, and it only took a handful hours for him to regret everything about the agreement.

Summer was, by far, the worst season.

“I’m meeeeelting,” Stiles crowed in a bad mimicry of the Wicked Witch from _The Wizard of Oz_. He flopped back into the grass he sat in, the pencil he’d been using to mark the wooden boards that would be used to floor the first room they were working on—the one Scott and Boyd and Isaac had spent the entire time measuring, and then partially arguing over and remeasuring again—flinging epically into the sweltering air. The sun above him beat down, making him feel like maybe Hell _was_ on Earth, and Apollo could certainly go fuck himself. He closed his eyes, watching the red blotch behind his eyelids pulse in time with his heartbeat. The grass was long enough that it tickled across his cheeks with the movement of his breathing.

He didn’t see the threat coming until it was too late.

“Catch,” Boyd called from somewhere up on the house’s porch, and Stiles only had a moment to open his eyes in confusion before a full water bottle was nailing him square in the chest.

“ _OOF_ ,” was all he managed to convey as the air whooshed from his lungs. He choked, his hands grasping at the front of his shirt, and the water bottle rolled off of him, leaving behind a trail of condensation to soak into the fabric of his sweat-drenched shirt.

“ _Boyd_ ,” Scott complained.

“I thought he’d catch it.”

“Stiles doesn’t have our good reflexes.”

“Stiles doesn’t have good reflexes, period,” Isaac decided to contribute, walking back from the truck Derek had rented to bring the wood in from the home supply store with more boards for Stiles to measure and mark cradled in his arms. His curls were slicked back from his forehead with sweat, but he seemed to revel in it, glowing with some kind of confidence that Stiles mostly attributed to his werewolf status, and Stiles hated him right in that moment for it.

“Oh, sure,” Stiles croaked as he sat back up, one hand still clutching desperately at the front of his shirt, the other scrambling blindly in the grass for the offensive object that also happened to hold the liquid of the gods. “Pick on Stiles. The only human who bothered to help your sad asses with this hellish activity.”

“There’s no way Lydia or Allison would have said yes to doing this kind of work. They’re less prone to making stupid decisions,” Isaac annoyingly pointed out, and Stiles almost threw the water bottle at him in return, but he’d only just found it again, and it was too enticingly cold to let back out of his grasp. Instead, he glared at Isaac as he cracked the seal on the cap, and then he proceeded to gulp the entire contents down in one go. The water that missed his mouth soaked pleasantly into the collar of his shirt, and he suddenly wished he’d thought to pour some over his head instead of ingesting it all.

“Cute,” offered Erica drily when Stiles resurfaced with a gasping belch that was half a gurgle. She’d just emerged from the house with her own water bottle in hand, her shirt twisted into a knot above her navel, showing off the hint of the abs they all knew she was extremely proud of, and her hair tied up high and plastered to her neck with sweat.

“Lydia isn’t human,” said Derek as he came up behind Erica in the large doorway, a rag between his hands. He’d lost his shirt somewhere between bringing the beams into the house and telling Stiles to start adding measurements to the boards he was going to cut, but Stiles was so used to Derek being shirtless at this point that he barely even registered it. “The house catches a lot of sound,” he explained when Stiles shot him a deadpan look.

“That is _not_ the problem I’m having with you right now,” Stiles replied.

Derek only rolled his eyes and flung the rag over his shoulder in such a way that not a single eye was not on him by the time the cloth had settled with a snap. No matter their respective sexual orientations, Derek just had that alpha pull to him that often made them all start looking at him before they’d realized it had even happened, and his body didn’t help to dissuade any of the staring. Even Scott was staring despite Derek no longer being his alpha, it was just that something about him. If Derek noticed, he made no indication of the matter.

“You always have a problem with me,” he said.

“That’s not the point.”

“Then the point is irrelevant.” And, before Stiles could do anything more than sputter indignantly at being dismissed, Derek wound around Erica and jumped lightly into the grass, effectively moving the conversation on without Stiles’ consent. “I’m headed out for the food. Text me what you guys want. _One_ text,” he added on firmly. “I’m only reading one text. Make it count.”

“You gotta tell us where you’re going first,” Stiles said, pushing to his feet.

Derek gave him a look. “Does it matter?”

A resounding chorus of “ _Yes_!” (even Boyd had decided to offer his voice for that one) that Derek got in return for his ignorance seemed to remind him he was in the company of a bunch of teenagers, and he sighed dramatically in time with his signature eye roll as a response. Stiles decided now wasn’t the time to point out Derek wasn’t _that_ much older than them, and it wasn’t _their_ fault he had no understanding of taste when it came to food, but he certainly thought it.

Derek relented. “In-N-Out is the closest.”

Stiles fist-pumped the air triumphantly. Scott let out a breath like he’d been holding it in anticipation. Even Erica and Isaac looked relatively relieved to hear this, and Stiles wondered for just a second exactly what Derek has subjected them to since turning them into werewolves.

“That’s going to be a long text,” Boyd said as his response to the same information, standing stoically and looking distinctly unimpressed. “You’re going to mess it up.”

Derek’s eyes narrowed, but he said nothing.

“Someone should go with him?” Isaac tried, but it sounded like a question rather than a statement.

“Nose goes,” Erica said then, loudly enough to obviously be for Stiles’ benefit. Unfortunately for him, volume didn’t help his human reaction time, and he was the last one to touch his nose by a long shot.

“Okay, not even remotely fair!” he whined after the fact. “This is _rigged_ , I shouldn’t be included at all.”

Stiles turned to Scott, and Scott quickly swapped his happy victory grin out for an apologetic look, but it was heavily marred by the fact his finger was still pressed to the tip of his nose. Stiles threw his empty water bottle at him as he trudged his way towards the truck, which Derek had already slid into at some point when Stiles wasn’t paying attention, but Scott easily deflected the assault by stepping to the side, laughing all the way.

“I’m stealing fries from all of you,” Stiles warned them gravely, not bothering to raise his voice beyond a dramatic whisper. The offended noise Erica gave in return almost made the fact he lost worth it. There was no way he was going to make that entire drive back with all that food in his grasp and not eat any of it. They should have thought of that before using his humanity against him.

“Tell Derek if he lets that happen, I’ll make his life a living hell,” Erica told him darkly, gesturing at the truck with both arms in a relatively rude gesture.

“You already do that,” Isaac reminded her, and Erica launched herself at him. Stiles was already by the truck and couldn’t see the damage she was doing, but, by the way Boyd started laughing and Isaac started outright yelling, he assumed it was a decent show.

“And tell him to put a damn shirt on,” Scott added loudly, just as Stiles was wrenching the door open to find Derek holding his head in one hand over the steering wheel, and Stiles, despite himself, started laughing again.  
  


* * *

“Eight orders of fries?” Derek muttered drily as he pulled away from the drive-thru window, the girl that had handed the food over watching him go with an unmistakable look of amusement beneath the blush on her face.

Seated next to him with the food bags covering his lap in full and two trays of drinks balanced precariously between his knees and feet, Stiles nodded his head in a way he hoped properly expressed his opinion on the matter. “Fast food fries are the best thing when you get them from the right places, okay? For the love of god, Derek, what the hell did you even eat as a teenager?”

Derek rolled his eyes. “I didn’t eat a lot of fast food, I had basketball to worry about and my mom was an enforcer of the dinner-at-the-table cliche. If it wasn’t the crap they served at school, it was whatever my dad made for dinner. Fast food was for when Peter was in charge, and that didn’t happen very often. He always got Chinese take-out, anyway.” He hesitated, but not long enough for Stiles to do more but take a breath in preparation to reply around a mouth full of fries that were definitely not going to be his once distribution occurred. “We tried to keep the cooking up after we moved to New York, but Laura wasn’t exactly an Iron Chef, and the town we lived in mostly had family restaurants, not chains.”

Stiles pressed his lips together, rearing back the wince of regret at his lack of control over his mouth. Cagey as Derek could be when it came to the time between the fire and his return to Beacon Hills, Stiles (and everyone else by extension, because if Stiles wasn’t asking the questions no one else wanted to ask, then they certainly weren’t either) knew next to nothing about that time frame, and he had a bad habit of forgetting that he didn’t know rather than the time simply just not existing in the first place.

“When was the last time you ate a french fry?” he asked as quickly as he could to keep Derek from potentially catching on. It was his form of manners, take it or leave it.

Derek responded first by giving Stiles a look that was all eyebrows. “Two days ago. I go shopping, you know. I buy groceries.”

“You buy fries at the _grocery store_?”

“You do realize the frozen section exists, right? There’s food in there?”

“My dad is on a perpetual diet for his heart, dude. I’ve seen bags of frozen peas in many iterations in my lifetime. But fries?” Stiles stuck his tongue out. “I can’t believe you go out and buy frozen fries, but you won’t go out and get the good shit.”

Derek said nothing in response, but he adopted a hard glare that probably would have incernerated the car in front of them had laser eyes been a werewolf thing. Clearly, Stiles had won that little battle, and Derek was going to retaliate by going utterly silent. Really, though, Derek should have known better by now than to think that would actually work. He’d known Stiles for long enough.

Because, when left with a silence that begged to be filled, Stiles did what a Stiles does best: he filled it with chatter. About how hot the days were getting despite it being dangerously close to the start of the school year, the splinters he was totally expecting to get from getting so up close and personal with all that wood, both charred and new, and a myriad of other things that Derek, to his credit, ignored fairly valiantly. Had Stiles been on Derek’s side of things, he absolutely would have thrown Stiles out of the car by now.

But Derek didn’t say a word as Stiles tested his boundaries and continued to talk, shove food into his mouth at periodic moments, and talk some more. He had a strange feeling it maybe had something to do with the fact Stiles was willingly helping him rebuild his old family home, but he didn’t want to ask and risk Derek coming to a realization that he definitely didn’t need to treat Stiles any differently than he always did in order to get help when there was good fast food involved. Stiles’ stomach always came first. Period.

“Also?” he tacked on when Derek still said nothing. “Thinking maybe we should uninstall that fireplace in the living room. Or, whatever it is. I’m still struggling with the architecture when the house all looks the same while crispy.” He shoveled a few more fries into his mouth, chewed a handful of times, and continued on. “Regardless, it’s gotta go. Tasteless to keep it in. I don’t want to see a single brick of that bullshit once we start putting furniture in.”

Finally, that got a snort from Derek. “Who said you were going to help with the furniture? You get worked up over fast food, I don’t think you’re exactly an exemplary choice for something like interior decoration.”

Stiles’ mouth popped open in offense. “It’s not my fault you don’t understand the inherent structure of the fast food hierarchy!”

“It’s all food, what does it even matter?”

“Oh, my _god_.” Stiles reached up and pressed his palms to his ears. The drinks in his lap rattled dangerously without their safety net to keep them firmly grounded. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this level of blasphemy right now.”

“Spill those drinks in this rental and I’ll spill your insides all over the asphalt,” Derek threatened, pointing a finger at Stiles without taking his hand off the wheel.

Stiles rolled his eyes. “Dude, you don’t even sound convincing with your threats anymore. Remember when those used to work on me?”

Derek’s lips quirked up, telling Stiles he did indeed remember when they worked, but then he raised one eyebrow and gave Stiles a sharp look out of the corner of his eye when Stiles still didn’t replace his hands on the drinks. “Stiles,” he warned.

“Okay, alright,” Stiles amended, doing exactly what Derek wanted him to do. “But at least eat one and tell me they’re not better than that frozen crap you’re trying to compare them to.”

Derek’s lips pursed, and then he sighed as if accepting a great burden and held his hand out, palm up, in acquiescence. “Fine,” he said curtly. Stiles just barely restrained himself from doing a victory fist-pump.

Stiles handed him a fry, which Derek quickly popped in his mouth as he turned the wheel with his other hand, making Stiles have to rush both hands back out so as not to lose his grip on all the bags seeping grease into his lap and the drinks just begging to wet his pants and the interior of the truck in one fell swoop.

“Alright, fine,” Derek finally said after he’d thoroughly consumed the fry and Stiles had eaten approximately six himself in the same timeframe, surrendering in his grouchy way. “They’re pretty good. Better than the frozen ones, at least.”

Stiles smiled and cocked his head, pleased with himself at the victory. “We’ll make a fast food connoisseur out of you yet.”

* * *

When they return, they return to a conglomeration of hungry, dirty teenagers that immediately crowd the truck (but only on _Stiles’_ side, of course) like rabid zombies in a cheesy apocalyptic movie with a very low budget. Stiles was genuinely surprised none of them broke the window with how eagerly they went at the door, hands grabbing for the food before Stiles had even had a chance to stick his foot through the opening.

“Stiles, you asshole!” Erica cried once she and the others had scrambled back to the front lawn with their greasy prizes, Stiles still sitting on the high seat of the truck, disgruntled and maybe sulking just a little at his loss. They didn’t even leave him a crumb. “You ate half of the fries!”

“I did not,” Stiles grumbled back.

“Mine’s fine,” Scott declared, holding up one of the pristine fry containers that must have been buried at the bottom of the bag, where Stiles’ grubby hands couldn’t quite reach. “Hey!” he yelled in protest when Derek, who happened to be wandering by him on his way back to the house, snapped the packet up without breaking his stride. “Dude! That’s mine!”

“ _Was_ yours,” Stiles just barely heard Derek reply, and gave Scott an apologetic wince he clearly didn’t understand the reason for when he threw Stiles an incredulous look, hands out in question. Stiles scrambled out of the truck, to stop Derek from pilfering more or to possibly try to stop a fight from breaking out, he wasn’t quite sure. “We got eight orders of large fries,” Derek continued, daintily eating the fries one at a time, and that was the exact moment Stiles realized he’d created a monster. “There are only five of you. Share the rest.”

“Stiles ate, like, four of them!”

“I did not!” Stiles protested again. “I ate maybe two. _Maybe_.” It was hard to actually estimate how much he ate, because he hadn’t really been paying attention to quantity neither before nor after he’d done the damage. But they didn’t need to know that. “Next time, don’t make me go get the food and you won’t suffer the consequences!”

Erica narrowed her eyes at him dangerously. Behind her, Isaac and Boyd, who had been relatively silent the entire time and compliantly digging into their burger and chicken nuggets, respectfully, shared a pointed glance. Taking it to be a sign they were going to gang up on him at some point while they were working on the house some more that afternoon, or possibly, even, the next day, Stiles decided maybe now was the time to make amends. And quickly.

“I’ll bring coffee tomorrow morning to make up for it, okay?” he tried. There was only so much he could do as the only human in the relative company, after all, and he knew flat out not showing up wouldn’t work, because Scott would just drag him along in the end, even if it meant picking him up and carrying him there. Scott perked up at the idea, having been, just like the rest of them, relatively groggy when he first arrived. Four in the morning? Should not be considered a real hour, honestly. “I have all the shit to do it from that one time we were supposed to go camping.”

Scott immediately frowned. “You mean back when we were fourteen?”

“Yeah. I don’t think it’s ever been used, it should be fine.”

“You brought coffee on a camping trip when you were fourteen?” Isaac asked.

Boyd shook his head and stuck another chicken nugget into his mouth. “Doesn’t actually surprise me. Look at him.”

Stiles shot him a sour look, to which he only smiled back in self-satisfaction as he chewed his food. “We didn’t actually go camping. Scott got strep throat and we had to cancel, and then we kinda forgot to go at all.”

“The coffee better not be that old,” said Erica. “I’m not drinking it if it is.”

“I love the amount of faith you all have in me,” Stiles said sourly as he crossed his arms and stomped his way over to the house, where Derek had completely vanished into before the whole coffee debacle had come to life.

“You literally just ate all of our fries, dumbass,” Erica countered. “Why would we ever trust you again?”

“I. Did. _Not_!” Stiles said one last time, punctuating it with hand gestures in an attempt to better get his plea of _Not Guilty_ across. Then, he turned and yelled in the direction of the house, “Derek! Can you come and maybe back me up? I need an eyewitness!”

Derek said something in return, Stiles could hear whatever it was echoing through the creepily-empty shell of the house, but it wasn’t loud enough for Stiles to actually catch.

“He said no,” Boyd offered when Stiles squinted at the doorway in confusion. Stiles threw his hands up.

“Whatever! You’ll see! You’ll all see!” Crossing his legs at the ankles, he flopped back into the grass and fished around for the pencil he’d been using to mark the boards. “Now, if you slackers will excuse me, I have _work_ to do. I would like to finish this house and never see it again _before_ I turn thirty.”

That got a round of amused noises from every werewolf on the premises within Stiles’ hearing range, and he resolutely ignored them all.

It wasn’t until a number of hours later, as the afternoon was well underway and getting ready to curb into the early evening, that Derek dropped the last of the wood he’d purchased for the start of the floors onto the grass and declared the work done for that day done. Exhausted, sore, and maybe suffering from a mild case of heatstroke, Stiles wasn’t about to argue. Instead, he picked up his discarded shirt, torn from his torso right about when the hour slipped past twelve in the afternoon and the sun got downright unbearable, and gave Derek a tired pat on the shoulder and told him he’d see him in the morning.

He didn’t miss the way Derek’s face wrinkled up in amusement rather than annoyance like it might have a few months ago, before they’d had the chance to bond over a little poison, some frankly terrifying individuals that absolutely wanted them dead, and quite a lot of pool water, but he also didn’t have the energy—or the interest, really, because Derek was Derek, and as long as he wasn’t trying to kill Stiles, Stiles wasn’t going to put forth the same amount of effort he’d wasted at the beginning of their acquaintance—to bother. He climbed into his Jeep with Scott and, with a promise to be back bright and early the next morning, they went home.

Once dropping Scott off, Stiles came home to his dad sticking something of the leftovers variety in the microwave for him before heading off for the night shift, and Stiles just barely managed not to fall asleep at the table before he finished his dinner.

(He did, however, accidentally waste all the hot water by doing exactly that in the shower afterwards, but, hey. If his dad didn’t know he'd almost offed himself many a time by being best friends with a werewolf that not only had very dangerous packmates but also a very dangerous girlfriend whose family sometimes wanted all of them dead, then he absolutely didn't need to know the amount of times Stiles had also almost drowned in the shower—this time included—either.)

That night, he slept like the dead, and not even Scott relentlessly texting him about what to get Allison for their anniversary woke him up.

* * *

Stiles showed up the next day with a portable hotplate, a glass coffee carafe, a bag of ground coffee, and the excesses essentials needed to brew the stuff.

He left Scott sleeping in the Jeep when he arrived at the Hale property and made himself comfortable on the front porch, where he set up all the necessities to make the coffee. The process slowly woke him up in a way driving didn’t, and, by the time Derek showed up roughly twenty minutes later looking like a zombie, he had already downed a cup and a half of the stuff himself and had one at the ready for whoever showed up next. He’d been expecting Scott, considering his proximity, but Scott had never exactly been the punctual type, conscious or unconscious.

Derek frowned at Stiles as he closed the distance at a slow meander, though Stiles couldn’t quite tell if it was intentional or just Derek’s RBF on full display. All the same, Stiles nodded his silent greeting, grabbed one of the partially-filled mugs, and topped it off with a little of the newly-brewed and scalding hot coffee just to make sure it all was warm before lifting it up in offering.

“Coffee?” he attempted to entice, and then winced when his voice barely carried the first word he’d said at all that day, having greeted Scott earlier with nothing more than a wordless nod that he wasn’t sure Scott even witnessed, considering he never once opened his eyes. Stiles cleared his throat and tried again, succeeding with only slightly less gravel to the attempt.

Derek blinked blearily at the mug as Stiles held it his way. “Did you make that?”

Stiles’ shoulders slumped as he executed his full-bodied “Are you serious?” expression, sloshing the scalding hot coffee slightly over the lip of the mug as he went, but thankfully in the opposite direction of his hand. “No, Derek, I summoned it from the heavens because God owed me a solid and I thought, hey, coffee is a good option.” He held the mug higher insistently. “ _Yes_ , I made the coffee. Jesus. Take it. Wake your werewolfy ass up before you ask an even stupider question.”

Derek only continued to frown at the mug, held aloft before him, like it was asking him for money he didn’t think he needed to give. Before Stiles could tell him it wouldn’t _bite_ him, for fuck’s sake, Derek opened his mouth again and declared, “I don’t like black coffee.”

“Congratulations,” Stiles replied drily without lowering the mug an inch. “Luckily for you, I brought cream and sugar. Just take the goddamn cup or so help me—”

Derek took the mug gingerly, cutting Stiles off before he had to make something drastic up to end the threat. Hands now fully free, Stiles twisted in his seat and wrenched his backpack open again, pulling out handfuls of sugar packets and little plastic containers of Hazelnut CoffeeMate. Derek stared openly at the two fistfuls Stiles offered him.

“Where did you get those?” he asked warily, sounding exactly like he didn’t want to know the answer.

Unfortunately for him, Stiles wasn’t one to ignore a chance to talk. “I grabbed them from the gas station on my way over while getting gas. Hazelnut was the only kind they had, though. Come on, my arms are getting tired.”

Derek closed his eyes briefly and took a deep breath. It looked an awful lot like a move the Sheriff loved to use in Stiles’ presence, but Stiles decided to ignore it in favor of Derek finally taking the cream and sugar from his hands and adding it to his coffee, which he only had the pleasure of witnessing for a handful of moments before Erica arrived on the scene and practically mauled Stiles in a desperate attempt to get her own hands on some of the brew, Boyd trailing slowly behind her and doing nothing to save Stiles from her ministrations.

Isaac showed up not long after them, and then, eventually, Scott dragged himself from the Jeep and proceeded to gulp down the coffee Stiles placed in his hands in three swallows before holding the mug out for more, which Stiles gave him only after staring at him and saying, “Sometimes, that mouth of yours terrifies me, and I am scared of the things you could do with it.”

“Sounds like a question of proposition to me,” Boyd said from behind his mug. Stiles had brought them all from home, and Boyd had ended up with the one that said _Best F♡cking Sheriff Ever_. It was the one Stiles had gotten for his dad last year as a birthday present.

(He’d have to clean them and put them away before his dad realized he’d pilfered the cabinets, but he hadn’t had the time or the energy to stop by the local Goodwill before making good on his promise, so there hadn’t been much of a choice.)

Stiles waved the coffee pot at him. “Literally nothing about that was a question. I am legitimately scared of Scott’s swallowing capabilities, and I’ve known him longer than I’ve known any of the other joys of being alive.”

“Awe,” Erica cooed. “Scott is one of your joys in life? That’s so cute.”

Stiles opened his mouth to retaliate, but then found, yeah, okay. She could have that one, because she wasn’t wrong. He closed his mouth again and offered to top her mug off, which she accepted with an elegant smirk of knowing.

“Also?” she continued once her coffee was back to her preferred taste, gesturing to Stiles massive coffee pot. “What _is_ that thing?”

Stiles looked at the thing in question like he wasn’t understanding what she was asking. “A … coffee pot?” he tried when looking at the coffee pot brought no more understanding than not looking at it had.

Erica raised a single blonde eyebrow. “You brought a full-sized carafe?”

Stiles looked over at Scott to see if he was understanding her any better, but he was busy talking to Isaac about something and didn’t notice, so Stiles had to turn back to Erica again and try, simply, “Yes?”

“You don’t have a moka pot?” she asked, in such a way that Stiles felt suddenly extremely uncool for _not_ having one, despite not being sure what one even was.

He ended up projecting this lack of knowledge by asking, “The hell is a moka pot?”

“A stovetop pot for making coffee. Way easier to manage than that huge thing.”

Stiles gave her a look, complete with narrowed eyes and plenty of judgement. He pointed to his coffee pot with the hand that was not holding it. “This is a pot and it goes on the stove, and I use it for making coffee. It does the job just fine.”

She shook her head. “A moka pot is better.”

Scoffing, Stiles accepted the mug Isaac was suddenly shoving across Scott’s person and filled it up again without exchanging a word with him. He handed it back, and Isaac garbled something that could have been thanks but was hard to discern by the way he meshed it in with whatever he was in the process of saying to Scott.

“You're sounding dangerously like Jackson,” Stiles said, replacing the coffee pot on the hot plate. “And unless you have a _moka pot_ hidden in those short shorts of yours, we’re just going to have to stick to what I brought.”

Erica eyed him, her big brown eyes narrowed and shifting between his like she was debating obliterating him on the spot. Stiles wasn’t sure if she picked that up from Derek or she’d always had the ability, but he felt the sharp niggling sensation of being skinned alive tickle the back of his brain.

Then, she smiled, wide, toothy, and perfectly feral. “Oh, Stiles. I am going to change your entire game tomorrow, just wait.”

Stiles pursed his lips, decidedly unimpressed. “Bring it,” he quipped back, and then slid off the porch to get started on the day as Derek emerged from the trees after doing whatever it was Dereks do at five in the morning. “We’ll see whose pot comes out on top.”

And, when Erica started laughing at Derek’s change in expression as he caught the end of the conversation, Stiles decidedly ignored the feeling of satisfaction that bloomed in his gut.

* * *

Erica ended up being right, and Stiles spent the rest of that summer trying his absolute damndest to make sure she didn’t know it.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FINALLY, the chapter the summary excerpt is pulled from. (What can I say, I got carried away again.)

Summer vacation came to a close the day they first tackled the massive hole in the back of the house. Previously covered in tarp to keep the rain out, they’d been saving it for last on the ground floor checklist before going at the stairs, both because it was going to take a lot of physical labor none of them, barring Derek, particularly wanted to give and because it was the last permit they had needed to acquire. By ten o’clock, Stiles was already covered in sweat, and Erica was threatening to bring the hose into the house if Derek didn’t put the goddamn hammer down and let them all spray each other with water for an hour before noon came and it became too hot to even breathe in a house that barely had structure, never mind air-conditioning.

Peter and Cora had come back at that point, but neither had done much more than raise an eyebrow at the work the two packs had accomplished in their absence (which, okay, wasn’t much, but none of them had a background in construction, so Stiles thought they were doing a pretty decent job considering they were winging it), their relation to one another painfully stark right in that moment, before Cora had declared her week full with job-searching to keep her busy and in Beacon Hills and Peter had, well, just muttered something snarky and walked away. Since it was Peter, no one bothered to follow him and make him do his part, but Stiles would have been lying if he said it hadn’t irked him a little that they were basically cleaning up his mess.

(But then he remembered that Peter had been there at the time of the fire and been put into a coma for his efforts of surviving it, and he thought, okay, maybe Peter could have this one, even if he was a total douchebag. Stiles might have been bitter, but he wasn’t _heartless_.)

(Well. Most of the time, anyway.)

He did wish Peter was around when Derek released them to the yard to commandeer the hose and battle it out in the grass that still desperately needed mowing, however, if only so Stiles could potentially ruin one of his stupid V-neck shirts with a heavy helping of mud. But he wasn’t, and Derek alone watched from the porch as they all went apeshit, tossing buckets of water at each other and tackling their soaked bodies into the mushy contents of the ground where grass had never grown. Shirts were lost along the way, shoes were rendered useless, and Derek had to yell at them more than once for getting too close to the house with the spray and the mud balls that sailed through the air with reckless abandon.

Stiles got nailed with more perfectly-aimed mud balls than he would admit to if asked later, but he retaliated each time with his mud-slathered body by hurling himself into whoever got close enough to him, and only missed a handful of times, much to his lungs general chagrin, considering he got the wind knocked out of him each time he did miss and thudded bonelessly onto the ground like a sack of potatoes. Turns out, the padding they had to wear for lacrosse? Was actually more protection than he’d thought, now that he’d experienced the same kind of maneuver used in the game, only without the gear to soften his fall.

After the designated hour was up, Derek demanded they hose down to get rid of all the mud before going back into the house, and they proceeded to drag the action out for so long that, after a good twenty minutes of only Erica hosing off her third layer of mud after being thwarted by a bored Boyd and Isaac, waiting for their turn with the hose, Derek threw his hands up in exasperation, dropped from the porch, and wrenched the hose from Erica’s grip. He proceeded to spray every single one of them down relentlessly, ignoring the gargling cries that ushered forth as Stiles, Scott, and Isaac each had no chance to close their laughing mouths before being targeted by the impressive power Derek’s thumb had rendered the hose spray to.

“Uncle!” Stiles cried, using the flat of his hand to desperately try and redirect the water even as Derek closed the distance between them. “Uncle, Derek, _UNCLE_!”

The spray redirected with a laugh on Derek’s part, and Stiles was ordered off to dry in the sun next to Erica as Derek set his sights on a compliant Isaac and a bristling Scott.

“That was fun,” Erica said lightly as Stiles flopped down beside her, breathing heavily from her spread-eagle position, her wet hair a golden halo around her in the only dry section of grass that was left. “We should go to the pool one of these days.”

Stiles scoffed. It was timed perfectly with a loud “ _Derek_!” as Scott met his watery match. “Oh yeah, best memories of the pool. I think Derek has a fear of water from that whole incident, don’t take him back to the site of torture.” A gargle of indistinct origin immediately corrected Stiles’ statement, and he sighed before saying, “Okay, no fear of water, clearly. Also still no good memories of that place. Why should we go back to it? He’d probably relapse or something.”

Erica said nothing, and it took Stiles rolling his head in the grass to face her to realize she was staring at him instead of answering. He blinked at her. She proceeded to stare at him long enough for him to finally go “What?” before she gave the house behind them as pointed a look as she could without lifting her head.

Ah, right. Forgot about that.

“Okay,” Stiles relented. “You have a point. Maybe he’s into revisiting places that gave him PTSD. I don’t know his kinks.”

Erica made a face and said, sounding strangely similar to his dad when Stiles was just full of it on a particular day and he was too tired of the antics to keep up, “Ew, Stiles.”

“What? You’re the one who’s kissed him. You can't tell me you’ve never thought about what turns a walking embodiment of a brick house like that on.”

Erica blinked at him, then wrinkled her face up. “How the hell did you know I’ve kissed him? You weren’t even there.”

“Uh, _Isaac,_ ” Stiles said in the same way one might say, “Uh, _duh_.”

“Huh?” said Isaac from somewhere in the distance, but they both ignored him.

“I hate all of you,” Erica said dramatically, and threw her head back into the grass again with all the elegance of a true prima donna.

“I’m not even a werewolf and I know that’s a load of bullshit.”

Her teeth flashed in a smile, but if she was going to say anything in response to Stiles’ statement, she was stopped by the arrival of Scott, Isaac, and Boyd clamoring onto the dry patch to air out, Boyd picking her up and placing her farther from Stiles and closer to himself as he wedged his muscle wall of a body between them and Scott flopping his head down dangerously close to Stiles’ gonads with Isaac not far behind.

Derek appeared in Stiles peripherals after they had all settled, Isaac already on his way to dozing off in the bright glare of the sun, and he looked less than pleased about the consequences of his actions (because it was obviously his fault this happened— _he_ was the one who let them have the hose, after all), but he sat down in the grass with them all the same and let them dry out in peace. Not even Stiles interrupted the quiet.

Cora didn’t show up that day, and Peter hadn’t been seen since the early hours, where he’d pilfered some of the coffee (in Boyd’s designated Goodwill mug— _Don’t Mess With THIS Grandma_ in pink pseudo-glitter lettering—which he didn’t seem all that upset about, actually) and then declared the hole none of his business and vanished back into the woods to terrorize someone or something else, but that was okay with Stiles.

They didn’t need Peter. They could handle this on their own. They’d done just fine so far, after all.

* * *

It became a habit, even once school started.

Waking up at 4:30 on the weekends, slugging around through the dark and making his way over to the Hale house, where everyone else was also heading, his coffee and hotplate in his backpack. Erica brought her weird little coffee pot, and, with the cream pilfered from the mini fridge Derek brought from his loft to at first to hold the water and then later random essentials when the gas station clerk started catching onto Stiles antics and threatened to ban him from the premises, together they made the coffee each morning.

It was always a silent endeavour—both of them were far too groggy in those early hours before Stiles’ Adderall had kicked in and Erica’s eyes had bothered to open to more than narrowed slits—but nothing about it felt awkward or wrong. It felt almost like a necessity to Stiles, the two of them sitting on the half-shredded porch with the coffee brewing between them, watching on partial alert as the others started to meander onto the grounds. With the return of school brought the return of Scott’s bike, his mother having declared before that it was only necessary for work and lacrosse practice—her way of trying to keep Scott from basically living at Allison’s the entirety of the summer, which everyone knew was Scott’s real goal behind anything else he did—and he arrived each morning thirty to forty-five minutes later than Stiles himself, rumbling in and being a general asshat about it, in Stiles’ sleep-deprived opinion.

(Stiles had never really thought allowing Scott on a motorcycle before the sun had even risen was any better an idea than allowing him on it at all, but he’d also never made the effort of letting Mrs. McCall know if only so he could have an extra half hour of sleep in the mornings without Scott to pick up.)

Sometimes there was an additional person allowed on the property—someone who didn’t ask too many questions about how a bunch of teenagers and a guy somewhere in his twenties were fixing up a burnt house without much by ways of heavy machinery within eyesight—to check and make sure things were still being built to standard or give feedback on how things should go before they moved onto the next set of tasks. Peter would always be there those times, smiling his too-charming facade of a smile, arms crossed tight across his chest, close at Derek’s side like he was helping to head the project and wasn’t going to abscond back into the town to do god knows what the second the stranger was off the property.

Cora had her job at the local bakery, and she’d show up sometimes early in the morning with doughnuts or pastries or bagels, and each time Stiles would contemplate proposing to her on the spot in return.

And they would continue to work on the house, even those that had originally been opposed to setting foot on the property at all.

Sometimes Allison would show up and use her background in gymnastics to hop around the house for reasons Stiles still couldn’t discern beyond that of simply showing off, but she also usually, surprisingly, kept Scott on task, so he let her do her thing without any lip on his part. She actually did work, too, which was more than Stiles could say about some of the others.

Lydia was the most scarce of the strange pack Scott was building for himself. She only really started showing up when Derek began delving into the interior design side of things, but it was always fun when she did decide to grace them with her presence if only because, one, she was still the subject of Stiles’ long-standing infatuation (even if he was slowly finding her much better as a close friend than anything else he imagined up in his teenage dreams), and, two, she and Cora butted heads spectacularly over the dumbest of things, and it was amazing to watch. They were rarely on the property at the same time, but when they were, it always ended in a snark-off about colors and cabinets and the visual integrity of the backsplash that was going behind a stove that hadn’t even been installed yet.

“It’s not like _she’s_ the one who’s going to be living here,” Cora had grumbled one day as Lydia’s car rolled away, her arms crossed tight across her chest and her expression a perfect mirror of the kind her brother had mastered and loved to use when someone—usually Stiles—was defying every possible crumb of logic they could in whatever it was they were doing. Stiles hadn’t been paying attention to what they’d been bickering that time around, too caught up in helping Boyd saw through some of the new beams Derek had brought in that morning, but he had no doubt it was just as stupid as all the others had been.

“They get along fine normally,” Isaac mused as he wiped his hands off on a rag, angling his head towards Stiles as he approached, confusion written all across his face. From the archway between the kitchen and the entryway, they both watched as Cora walked out to the porch with her hands on her hips, radiating annoyance. “What is it about wallpaper and tiny glass mosaics that get them at each other’s throats?”

“They’ve always been a little testy with each other,” Stiles corrected. When Isaac raised his eyebrows in question, Stiles shrugged. “I’ve seen some shit. Cora might be worse than Derek, and I would have bet my life before that wasn’t possible. The guy’s like that one drawing from _Lilo & Stitch_, only instead of bad, he’s mostly filled with snark.” Stiles hesitated. “And anger. And brooding.”

“I heard that,” Derek called from somewhere else. Isaac let out a quiet giggle. Stiles ignored him.

“They’ll be back to normal once this all is over, I’m sure,” Stiles said, smacking Isaac’s shoulder in reassurance, to which Isaac only gave an eye roll in response to and walked away, leaving Stiles to find whatever task he needed to complete next before Derek found him and accused him of lazing around.

Scott would always leave around three or four, citing homework, which they all knew he wasn’t actually doing, and Allison, which they knew he was, as his reasons for bailing so early. No one really cared, and it wasn’t like they were going to get that much more done if Scott chose to stay the extra hour or two that Stiles always did, so Stiles never really understood why exactly Scott kept giving the excuse. He always just nodded his head, sometimes jokingly called Scott out on his negligence, and moved on with his life. It wasn’t like Scott would care if Stiles did give a shit, so why bother?

And, without Scott to take home, Stiles ended up staying later. More often than not, it would just be him and Derek and one of the betas (usually Boyd, rarely Isaac, and even rarer Erica) left to survey what was left and decide what to tackle the next weekend. Cora would never stay past noon, and Peter would typically be skulking around the woods, there in presence but not so much a help on anything as another figure to oversee something he didn’t ask to have done. Stiles figured, thanks to the ghosts the place likely held for him, that the small amount of work he did do somewhere between everyone arriving and everyone trickling back out one by one was more than any of them really could have asked, even though Peter was still a total asshole that no one really liked.

Some nights, when Peter wanted nothing to do with any part of the property and none of the betas wanted to stay, it was only Stiles and Derek. Those were few and far between, but they happened. They would be spent with Stiles hauling in whatever scraps were left behind in case of rain and Derek doing something home-owner-y inside the slowly evolving house, like trying to figure out what cabinets would look best or if wallpaper was a better endgame plan than paint without Cora or Lydia there to bully him into an opinion, and then wrapped up with Stiles offering one last cup of coffee and them both sitting on the porch and looking at the darkening sky in silence until Stiles couldn’t take it anymore and filled it.

The first time it happened, Stiles had been back to dabbling at filling his own bestiary during his scarce downtime and he had a search history full of a single topic that no one had been able to offer concrete evidence for or against, and it had been driving him insane for the better part of that week.

Naturally, that meant it was the perfect topic for filing a silence that was too comfortable for one party member and outright agony for the other.

“So,” Stiles said, and he could _feel_ the way Derek immediately started frowning. “Vampires.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Stiles saw Derek give him a look from behind the mug he had tipped to his lips, and, not for the first time, Stiles wondered how one obtained the precise ability to hold a conversation with nothing but one’s eyebrows like Derek had somehow managed to master.

“Well, are we sure they’re not real?” he asked instead of switching tracks and asking about Derek’s eyebrows—a proud moment of restraint, if he did say so himself.

“Have you ever met a vampire?” Derek retaliated. Stiles gave him a deadpan look.

“Well, I went sixteen years without meeting a werewolf. Maybe vampires are just better at hiding.”

“No, you hadn’t. You and Cora went to elementary school together.”

“Yeah, fine, but I didn’t _meet_ her. She was two grades above me and I only ever saw her in passing before Kate went bitch-krieg on you.” To this, Derek only raised those expressive eyebrows of his in response, and Stiles heaved an annoyed sigh. “Alright, alright. So I’ve been surrounded by werewolves this whole time and didn’t know it. Who says there’s not a vampire hiding in the shadows somewhere that we haven’t found yet?”

“Considering everything has popped out of the woodwork since Peter went and got you and Scott involved, I think, by now, you would have found a vampire. Trouble finds you, and you already have a bad habit of going looking for it anyway.”

“Jesus, Derek,” Stiles muttered, taking a drink from his own mug. “Now you just sound like my dad. Some people call that a healthy sense of adventure, okay?”

“And a distinct lack of self-preservation,” Derek added drily.

“It’s a congenital defect. I didn’t ask to be born this way.”

Derek scoffed, drained everything that was in his cup, and then set it down with a sigh. “Vampires aren't real. End of story.”

“Great,” Stiles replied brightly. “One less thing out there to kill us.”

“If that’s what helps you sleep at night,” Derek offered blithely, and Stiles had no choice but to gape at him as he got to his feet and flashed his teeth in a smile that told Stiles he was making fun of him, and was absolutely having a blast doing it. He held out his empty mug Stiles’ way with one finger, then wiggled it insistently when Stiles didn’t take it.

“I really hate you sometimes,” Stiles told him sternly, taking the mug with maybe more force than necessary.

“And yet you keep coming back.”

“Congenital defect!” Stiles reminded him as Derek started his way off the property. Derek only waved his hand through the air once by way of a response, and Stiles was left to clean the mugs out with the hose and bring them home on his own.

* * *

The second time it happened, it had been because they had reconvened at the Hale house following a battle with accidentally-loosed pixies (and their frantic wranglers, once they decided to finally show up, only after the battle was mostly done and all of them had already been blasted with a not-so-healthy helping of dust), simply because Deaton’s office was coated in a layer of the stuff the pixies had used to trap them where they wanted them and was impossible to traverse without becoming one with the walls in the process as they tried not to step on the strangely-iridescent floor.

(Because apparently some breeds of pixies shed a bad facsimile of glitter, and that shit was nigh impossible to get rid of once you had it on you, never mind the fact it had mind-altering magical properties that persisted even after the creatures that created it had been taken care of.)

Everyone was in a bad mood. Turns out, fighting something that can make you hallucinate thousands of multicolored butterflies swarming you was not a fun time, though Stiles thought it was pretty lucky they were pixies trained to induce relatively pretty things, even if they were in terrifying quantities. He shuddered to think what would have happened with wild ones.

Some of them, though, couldn’t let a specific part of the fight go. The specific part being Derek almost losing control of himself and going full werewolf, sans human common sense, over whatever the hell the pixies had made him see before the combined efforts of Erica, Stiles, and Cora had managed to snap him out of it, and the “some of them” meaning Peter.

_Only_ Peter.

Because everyone else was _too damn tired to give a shit, Peter_.

“Wouldn’t have been so horrific if _someone_ didn’t almost lose it right when we were in the heat of it,” Peter griped the second they all made it to the reserve in one piece, looking directly at Derek as he pulled his dust-coated shirt off. With a snap, he threw it onto the ground with far more force than necessary, springing a small cloud of the sparkly shit into the air, which everyone immediately jerked away from. “What the hell _was_ that, Derek?” Peter continued once safely away from his own mistake. When Derek only glared, Peter pointed a finger in Stiles’ direction. “Even _Stiles_ noticed.”

Stiles made a noise of extreme offense at that. Because, Jesus. He was human, not _blind_.

“My anchor is slipping,” Derek growled. “I don’t have the same relationship I used to have with anger. I’m losing my hold.”

“Sure doesn’t sound like it,” Stiles muttered drily, and Derek gave him a look that could have flayed him alive had Stiles not been overly used to receiving others exactly like it. Stiles felt that only helped prove his point.

“It’s not even a full moon!” Peter continued, throwing his hands in the air. Deaton quietly held out one of the large jars of herbs and salt the pixie wranglers had given them to clean themselves of the dust, and Peter let out a long breath as he accepted it.

“You saw what the dust can do,” Deaton said as he handed out the other jars to Boyd and Lydia. He peered at Derek a long moment as the sound of metal lids scraping against glass filled the air, followed by a pungent aroma of herbs Stiles couldn’t identify, and everyone started to break off into groups. Lydia, Allison, and Scott moved away, while Isaac, Erica, and Boyd went another direction, leaving Stiles, Derek, Cora, and Peter to the one Peter was already knuckle-deep in.

“Your anchor isn’t slipping,” Deaton accused suddenly, once the others had settled and started up, and Derek’s eyes slid closed. “It’s changing. You’ve already begun the process.”

Derek pursed his lips tight, but he said nothing, and that in itself confirmed Deaton’s suspicions.

“Great,” Peter grumbled. “Just fantastic.”

“Shut _up_ , Peter,” Stiles hissed, but Peter paid him no mind.

“You were right to start the process already,” said Deaton, though he had started to move away from the group like he was done dealing with them. “The switch shouldn’t take long if you know what you’re looking to change to.”

Derek gave Deaton a look that, honestly, was better suited for a teenager to give an overbearing parent, but that still somehow looked correct on Derek’s face despite his age being slightly out of date. Cora looked between Derek and Deaton, her brow furrowed, as she waited for her turn with the salt.

“You already have a new anchor in mind?” she asked. Still, Derek said nothing, but something about his silence seemed to tip Cora off, because she moved in closer. Derek pointedly met her eyes.

Cora blinked at her brother, her head twitching like she was silently asking him a question, before she suddenly jerked it over in Stiles’ direction and stared at him dead-on with her sharp brown eyes. Stiles involuntarily took a step back, his gaze darting from her to Derek, who was sighing like everything that moment was one big inconvenience, and back to Cora again just in time to see her irises flash yellow.

“You have _got_ to be kidding me,” she growled, then grabbed the jar from Peter, pivoted on her heel, and stormed into the house. They all watched her go in bewilderment save for Derek, who was reacting as one usually did with a dramatic younger sibling at hand, and for Erica, who was now watching Stiles curiously from afar, like he had anything to do with whatever the hell had just happened. Deaton, who had also watched Cora disappear into the house, had a strange smile on his face, and Stiles remembered immediately that he’d never really trusted the guy.

Silence, save for the sound of everyone scrubbing the salt rub over their skin and the gentle running of the hose as they washed it off, filled the air. No one said anything.

“So,” Stiles tried when it became clear they apparently were going to ignore it. “Someone mind explaining what that was all about?”

“No,” Derek snapped. And, evidently, that was that, because no one did.

The cleanup process was relatively quiet. They were all too exhausted from the fight to do much more than scrub off and change into the identical outfits of white t-shirts with the veterinary clinic’s logo on the front and black gym shorts Deaton had found in the back storage from some long-past fundraising event the town had thrown, all in sizes far too big for any of them. Their original clothes were draped along the porch bannisters and left to the elements to be cleansed or burned, whichever came first. Cora and Peter left first, asking Derek first what kind of Chinese food he wanted for dinner than night (noodles, the kind apparently nonconsequential, because “noodles” had been all he said) before absconding off the property with Lydia not too far behind. Scott, Isaac, and Allison left next, then Erica and Boyd with Deaton close behind, leaving Stiles and Derek alone to finish up.

Stiles and Derek went last with the scrub, their new change of clothes folded and waiting at the front door. Stiles didn’t mind being left behind that time. Just like the others, he was exhausted and wanted to be home, and he didn’t see any reason to make any of the others stick around just so Stiles had someone other than Derek to pester as he got rid of the day’s work still stuck to his skin. Exhausted enough, even, that the pestering was more akin to that of quiet babbling, because, god, he was starting to annoy even himself with how tired he was, and talking wasn’t helping.

(Not that it stopped him, of course.)

“Maybe one of us should learn some magic,” Stiles said as his chosen topic for that second night they were alone, after everyone had left. The rag he was using to scrub the rest of the cleansing salt off scraped grittily along his arm, making him feel like he’d had a day at the beach without any of the fun.

Derek looked up from where he was rinsing his hair out with the hose. “Magic?” he repeated. The lack of mocking in the repetition told Stiles he was open to consideration and was asking because he was curious.

“Yeah, like, maybe small spells,” Stiles continued. “Warding and detection things. Just so we can catch some of these things _before_ they get the chance to ambush us with their weird pixie ejaculation.”

“Warding,” Derek repeated quietly, then stuck his head back under the water.

Stiles returned to the process of scrubbing, holding the appendage out for Derek to rinse off, and repeating while Derek made sure every last bit of dust was gone from his head, lest he go werewolf again at the most inopportune moment.

“That’s not a bad idea,” Derek continued after his head had been completely rinsed. Water dripped down the length of his face as he turned to Stiles again, and Stiles tossed him a towel, which he caught deftly. “Not sure any of us is a good candidate for it, though.”

Stiles snorted. “Don’t tell Lydia that. She’d take it up just to spite you.”

“She’s a banshee. Historically, banshees and magic don’t mix well within one person. There’s a high chance of negation.”

“Like the werewolf bite.”

“Exactly,” Derek agreed. He dropped the towel over the porch’s rail and started for where they’d left the clean clothes. “Werewolves are a bad option, too. And I don’t want an Argent anywhere near something like that. We’d have to find someone else.”

“I could do it,” Stiles tried, lifting his head up, but Derek had already vanished around the side of the house to change, and Stiles knew he wasn’t going to get any kind of reply. He finished rinsing himself off in silence, then shut off the hose.

Scooping up the last set of clothes, Stiles took the opposite side of the house and went through the slow process of making sure all his appendages went into the right holes. It was harder than it sounded and, by the time he was done, he was painfully aware his shorts were on backwards, but he couldn’t give enough of a shit to go through the process of trying to get his legs in all over again.

When he came out again to throw his jeans next to all the others, Derek was already gone.

* * *

The first two times had been minor, Stiles would realize later. Moments that tipped off what lane his life was swerving into with reckless abandon. Nothing had happened exactly, nothing enough to allow the curse to awaken. The first two times were so easy, they probably shouldn’t have counted for anything. But the third time—

The third time is when something slipped.

It happened a number of weeks after the previous time had, mostly because work on the house had been put on hiatus with school really kicking it into gear and college becoming an ever-looming threat that no one, barring Lydia, was in any way actually prepared to face despite the way everyone and their grandmother, dead or alive (don’t ask), was reminding them that they were almost halfway through the school year and would be graduating before they could blink. It stressed all of them out. Even Lydia, by association, if only because she had to deal with Stiles all the time, and he couldn’t keep cool if someone paid him to do it. And, when Isaac had accidentally ripped a brand-new support beam out of one of the second-floor bedrooms not even an hour after it had been installed, Derek had decided maybe a break was needed, and they’d reconvene after a short two-weekend hiatus.

And, the break helped. A little.

To say they were still jittery with stress when they came back was putting it mildly, but at least they weren’t destroying the house moments after putting it back together again.

Their first day back was possibly the most peaceful one they’d had out of any of the collective days they had spent working on the property, with all of them relatively quiet and compliant as Derek put in orders for new appliances over the phone while Erica, Peter, and Cora scrolled through webpages on a laptop and tried to make sure Derek didn’t mismatch the stove and refrigerator. Lydia had been busy having a girls’ day with Allison that day, so she wasn’t there to offer any thread of chaos to an almost too-calm day, and Cora was able to pick her way through the options without Lydia’s commentary.

It was only Erica at the laptop when Stiles found his way to her side, and he caught sight of a bubblegum pink toaster flashing by the screen when he stepped over to the mini fridge for one of the water bottles, but it was quickly hidden in a tab and replaced by a stainless steel kitchen faucet, so Stiles decided it wasn’t his problem to have and moved on before Erica could threaten him against speaking up about it.

And, that day, they simply worked. It was possibly the most at peace with one another they had ever been, to the point where not only did Stiles not have a whole lot of jibes to pass around as Isaac and Boyd very pointedly continued to treat him like the human he was, but Peter also actually stuck around well into the evening. Sure, didn’t offer a whole lot of help while there, and he maybe spent a lot more time staring blankly at seemingly random walls, but he was there, and, strangely, somehow about that was endearing in a way Stiles absolutely never wanted to think of Peter as again once he realized just what exactly he was feeling.

Though it happened an hour or two later than it usually did, everyone started to leave the property one by one as the sun began to set beyond the thick line of trees that surrounded the house, and, before long, it was once again just Derek, who was doing his usual stint of making sure everything was in order and ready for the next weekend’s work, and Stiles, who was going to be coming home to an empty house and a shitload of homework and was desperately avoiding both by simply not going home just yet.

Derek didn’t ask questions when he found Stiles sitting cross-legged in the upstairs bathroom, chipping away at the old tile they were replacing. He simply stood there until Stiles finished, then tossed him a damp towel for his hands and beckoned him back outside, where they settled into their semi-regular routine of making one last pot of coffee before calling it a night.

Stiles did the coffee-making that night, and Derek took a turn at filling the silence by slowly recounting all the things they still needed to do for the house before it could be considered livable again, more as a ways of keeping Stiles himself up-to-date than as a reason to talk at all, but Stiles listened all the same. There was no guarantee he’d retain the information, but he had a pretty decent track record of doing so, so there was that, at least. He divvied out the coffee when it was ready, and he listened.

And it was as he watched Derek talk that he remembered, sharply and suddenly, what Derek used to be like, back before when everyone was against him and he didn’t try to explain himself otherwise. Who he had been when the world was his enemy and the only thing Derek knew how to do was to fight until he either won or died trying. It was so different from the Derek that sat next to him now that Stiles almost wondered if maybe everything up to this point had been a fever dream.

Sure, Derek still had the sarcasm and the brooding and the bite that just seemed to be in the Hale genome, if Peter and Cora were any walking indication, but he wasn’t the same guy who rebutted any chance to laugh or smile or tease those around him like the person he was now. He wasn’t the guy who kept everything he could to himself unless a chance to be superior arose or he was doomed to die lest he release whatever information he was holding close enough to his heart to kill. Derek still had that person within him—Stiles knew there was no way to fully let go of everything you had once been—but he had managed to lose a little of that in favor of something that seemed so much more alive.

And Stiles realized, where Derek had lost some of that hard, brutal person he’d used to be, Stiles had lost something, too. He had lost the willingness to throw himself at anything and everything and wait for the consequences to catch up with him, lost the trust he had in things he couldn’t control to just simply work out, because half of his world had already been taken from him, and he’d be damned if his luck was bad enough for the other half to go, too. Where Derek had lost the armor he wore against what he had left to endure, Stiles had lost the innocence of what he thought he knew of the same world that had taken everything from Derek and left him to an aftermath he didn’t deserve.

And, just then, Stiles suddenly understood, as Derek started to mutter about the amount of tile they still needed to order, all but oblivious to what was happening beside him, that he had lost his ability to simply let go, too. He was no longer the person he used to be. None of them were.

Now, Stiles put up a fight.

Yeah, he was still the same guy he had been at the start of it all—same that lanky, spastic kid that maybe didn’t take the world quite as seriously as it needed to be—but now he knew what he was dealing with. He was still lanky, still ADHD-certified and freaking out over things most of the others didn’t really care about. He still didn’t take the world as seriously as it demanded to be taken, but it was because now he knew how to fight back. He knew the kinds of things the universe wanted to throw at him, to annihilate him with, to bury him alive until he took his very last breath on a scream—and he fought that shit back tooth and nail and with every last bone in his body. He didn’t take the world seriously, and, now that he knew what it had to give him, he never would.

He had lost his innocence somewhere along the line, and in return he’d gained resilience. Defiance. An absolute audacity to stare danger in the face and demand it take him seriously instead.

He was still the same kid he’d been at the start of it all. The only difference was—now he was _more_.

Where Derek had lost the constant need to simply protect himself from what came next, Stiles had taken up the mantle for himself. And, where Stiles had lost a piece of his innocence, Derek had opened himself back up to the kinder things in life.

A loss and a gain, Stiles realized, as Derek went quiet next to him. A balance between them.

And that was when it all had perfectly clicked into place.

Derek blinked suddenly, his brow furrowing as he turned to Stiles and set his mug on the porch with a sharp _clink_. Stiles watched him out of the corner of his eye curiously, and only leaned away when Derek started _sniffing_ him.

“Uh, hello, excuse me,” Stiles said, holding a hand out until it was barely an inch away from pushing against Derek’s encroaching face. “Personal space, much?”

Derek wrinkled his nose, gave one last sniff, and finally returned to his upright position. “You smell like flowers.”

“Thank you?” Stiles tried, then gave his pit a sniff. No—smelled like boy sweat and failing deodorant to him. Mental note? Change brands. “Maybe one of the girls brushed off on me. I did wrestle Erica into a chokehold earlier over the danishes Cora brought.”

Derek snorted. “You mean _she_ wrestled _you_ into a chokehold. I was there.”

“Details, details,” Stiles said dismissively.

“You don’t smell like Erica.” He blinked a few more times, and Stiles could see the mental cogs struggling. “I don’t know the scent of many flowers beyond wolfsbane, but it’s definitely floral. And” —he paused, like what he was about to say didn’t make any sense to him— “metallic. Blood? Are you bleeding?”

Stiles immediately looked down at his hands despite already knowing he hadn’t suffered any recent injuries anywhere on his person, never mind his hands specifically. His calluses were huge, sure, but unbroken. “No?” he tried, looking up again. “Are you sure it’s me? Whoa, hold on, sniff at a distance, I know you can do it,” Stiles said quickly, his hand flashing back up, when Derek slightly craned his head in Stiles’ direction.

Derek rolled his eyes, but didn’t press in any further. He took a deep breath, held it, and shook his head slowly as he let it out. “Yeah, it’s you. But it’s faint now.”

“Huh,” Stiles said, completely unconcerned now, and then drained the rest of his cup. “Weird. Well, that’ll just be our mystery of the day I guess. I’m gonna dip. I have an essay due tomorrow.”

Derek’s eyebrows shot up, and just like that he was sufficiently distracted away from whatever malfunction his olfactory system was having. “Have you started it?”

“Don’t ask questions you already know the answer to, Derek.”

In response Derek gave Stiles a look that—dare he say it—could be considered fond, and out of nowhere Stiles felt a sharp pain jolt just above his heart. He winced, clutching a hand to his collarbone, and Derek’s potentially-fond expression immediately snapped to disgruntled alarm.

“What was that?” he asked sharply, but Stiles ignored that.

“Dammit,” he grumbled, rubbing at the spot. “I think maybe I pulled something.”

“You said you didn’t get hurt.”

“No, I said I wasn’t bleeding. There’s a difference.” Rolling his left shoulder back, he reached up and swung his backpack onto his right. “Probably pulled it while lifting something. Stop being so paranoid. It’s weirding me out.”

Derek closed his eyes briefly, a sharp breath expelling from his nostrils. “Whatever. Go home. I don’t want the sheriff on me because you’re out late on a school night.”

“Alright,” Stiles agreed easily. He slid off the porch. “See you at Deaton’s meeting on Tuesday?”

“No,” Derek grunted as he got to his feet, their mugs hanging together from two of his fingers. He’d rinse them out with the hose and set them to dry on a towel they kept in the kitchen for the next weekend. “I won't be there.”

“What? How come you get to ditch the meetings?”

“Not everything is your business, you know.”

Derek was absolutely right, but that didn’t mean Stiles wasn’t going to stare at him all the same until he relented.

“I’m meeting with someone about warding the house,” Derek admitted with a huff.

Stiles immediately frowned, his hands unconsciously fisting the straps of his backpack. “Did you background check this guy?”

“Lady,” Derek corrected. “And yes, Stiles, I learn from my mistakes.”

“Debatable,” Stiles offered to that, then turned and started making his way to his car. “Just don’t let her murder you, okay? I know how you attract stab-happy females,” he called back as he reached it, and, if Derek said anything by ways of a response, Stiles didn’t hear it.

He tossed his backpack into the passenger seat, started his car up, and drove the entire way home wondering if maybe he should skip the meeting, too, and make sure Derek didn’t end up dead in a ditch.

* * *

He knows he should probably let Derek handle his own rendezvous and trust him to break the status quo and _not_ get in deep shit with this mystery lady, but Stiles had never been one to go gently, and now was absolutely not going to be the exception. He _intended_ to let it go the moment he drove off the Hale property, sure, but something about the whole _Derek meeting a total stranger without any backup directly at hand_ stuck in his brain, and he woke up the next day with his face stuck to the essay he’d been in the middle of printing out when he’d fallen asleep and the raging need to know what the hell Derek was doing with that lady ringing in his head.

He didn’t know why it was bothering him so much this time when Derek had done so much worse in the past, but—no, yeah, wait. That was exactly why. Derek had a terrible track record, and it specifically had to do with women.

Sure, okay, maybe before Stiles really hadn’t given that much of a shit regardless, but he was getting tired of waiting to deal with the fallout when he could instead just nip the thing in the bud. And, dammit, it was _bothering_ him, who cared about the specifics? Maybe he was growing a Spidey Sense, finally. Or whatever it was called.

Yeah. Until Derek met with the lady and got back safe and sound with her not trailing behind, this was going to bother Stiles, and he was _not_ going to be quiet about it.

“She’s warding the house, Stiles, holy shit,” said Scott, not for the first time, as he pulled his shirt off in favor of his lacrosse gear for practice that afternoon. “That’s what Derek told you.”

“Yeah, but why couldn’t he let Peter do it? Why did it have to be Derek?”

“Because no one likes Peter?” Scott offered and, okay, that was true. “Why do you even care? It’s Derek. You don’t even like Derek.”

“I like Derek!” Stiles protested, throwing his hands up. Scott just looked at him. “I _do_. I’m way over that fear I used to have of him. Lost that back when Jackson tried to kill us and we had to spend two hours wet and plastered together to keep from drowning because _someone_ was being a shitty best friend.”

Scott rolled his eyes and turned away. “Are you ever going to get over that?”

“No!” Stiles struggled for a moment as he strapped his knee pads on, nearly toppling off of the bench. Scott, maybe potentially aware of his turbulent status as being on the rock-bottom end of the “good best friend” spectrum, reached out and steadied Stiles. Stiles glared at him for his efforts, to which he only smiled back. “That’s all beside the point. If Derek gets into trouble with this, we’re all going with him.”

“I don’t know. I think he’s pretty good at handling those kinds of things now. I haven’t noticed anything off about his other meetings.” Scott snapped his stick up and spun it in his grip. “You know, all the other ones you didn’t give a shit about before? Serious, Stiles, why do you care this time? I’m not worried. Nothing about this screams suspicious to me.”

“That’s because you’re the embodiment of a brick wall, Scott,” Stiles mumbled.

Scott turned to frown at Stiles, head cocked accusingly, but was stopped from saying anything by Danny walking up to his locker. With both Scott and Stiles suddenly silent and staring at him, he eyed them without lifting his head, immediately suspicious.

“What?” he asked warily.

“Nothing,” they’d replied together, entirely too fast, and Danny did them the favor of looking completely unconvinced.

“You two are so freaking weird sometimes,” he muttered, then started putting his gear on. “You do realize sound carries in here, right? I could hear you two talking about Derek doing something sketchy?”

Scott’s head snapped to Stiles, and Stiles winced. Right. Tile echoes. You’d think they’d have picked that up a while ago.

“Derek’s a sketchy person?” Stiles offered. Danny only rolled his eyes, more aware of the fact thanks to the entire Jackson debacle.

“Says the one who lied to me about him being your cousin.”

“I was thinking on my feet!” Stiles protested. “I wasn’t about to be all, ‘Hey, Danny, I brought you into my room to ask for help and I’m going to need you to ignore the guy with blood on his shirt in the corner because he just happens to be _Derek_ freakin’ _Hale_. AKA, the guy that had been previously arrested _by my dad_ for allegedly _killing his own sister_.’” Stiles shook his head like he was accusing Danny of being insane. “Yeah, that would have gone over well!”

Danny lifted his head and frowned at Stiles for a beat, then said, “Why _was_ he in your room, anyway?”

Scott pinched Stiles’ side in alarm, and Stiles nearly snapped his teeth shut on his tongue in reaction. “That’s confidential,” Stiles said curtly as he smacked Scott in the arm without bothering to hide the action.

Danny gave him a look that was pure _I’m-offended-you-think-I’m-falling-for-that_. Stiles cleared his throat, ready to elaborate, when he was suddenly overcome with vertigo. He swayed where he stood, knocking his shoulder hard against his locker, and both Scott and Danny jumped to attention, talking over each other in an attempt to ask what just happened.

“Jesus, I’m fine,” Stiles said quickly, making a valiant effort to push both of them off at once. “It was just some sudden dizziness and nausea. I think my body is revolting to all of the Derek talk.” He hesitated then, swallowing thickly as he realized something. “Does anyone else smell blood?”

Scott gave him a strange look. “Yeah,” he agreed slowly, then shot a glance at Danny, who had reached out to grab Stiles’ arm when he started to sway, and was now frowning at Stiles and watching him intensely. If he thought the fact Scott could also smell blood was weird, though, he didn’t bother to say anything about it.

“Are you getting a nosebleed?” Danny asked instead, completely bypassing Scott.

“Probably,” Stiles mumbled, and Scott tilted his head, catching the lie. Stiles ignored his questioning gaze in favor of Danny, who, bless the guy, actually seemed concerned. “You got any tissues? I think there might be a bloodbath in my near future.”

Danny’s eyes narrowed, as if also catching Stiles’ lie there and wondering why he was doing it, but he nodded his head and walked off all the same, and Stiles let out a breath and turned on Scott.

“I swear to god, Scott, this whole school is going to know you’re a werewolf before we have a chance to graduate. We only have, like, seven more months. Keep it in the bag!”

“Okay, okay, sorry,” Scott relented, sounding anything but. “Back up, what’s with the dizziness? Don’t say nosebleed, I heard your heart.”

God, Stiles missed the days when lying to Scott about something was easy and relatively harmless (and usually always for Scott’s own benefit). Stupid werewolf senses. Stupid heartbeat.

Stiles scoffed. “Who cares? I probably bit my tongue or something, took too much Adderall; the possibilities are endless and I’m not drowning in the stuff, so it doesn’t matter. What matters is Derek might be coming back in a body bag, and I have a bad feeling about all of this.”

He conveniently skipped over the fact Derek had also smelled blood just the night before. What Scott didn’t know he couldn’t get the details mixed up about, and, seriously. Stiles wasn’t dying. Probably. They could deal with it at a later date. He didn’t need Scott running to Allison with all the details Stiles didn’t want her to know and turning it into yet another ordeal that would get blown wildly out of proportion.

“You have a bad feeling about everything,” Scott countered.

“And I’m _right_!” Stiles said a little too enthusiastically, if the way he suddenly stumbled against the bench in time with his grand hand movement was any indication. “I don’t trust this warding woman, okay. Somethin’ don’t feel right.”

Scott rolled his eyes, then seemed to think of something he thought was clever, because his expression turned mischievous as he suggested snarkily, “Maybe she’s his new anchor with benefits.”

Stiles made a move to guffaw at the idea, only for the air to suddenly catch in his throat and cause him to start choking. He doubled over, hands clutching first at his stomach, then his chest, and then his throat, as the taste of blood surged its way up to his mouth. He felt two sets of hands scrambling their way around his person, trying to guide him somewhere, but he was too busy panicking to really bother to be of any use to their endeavours.

He couldn’t breathe. He felt like he actually was dying.

The skin above his left collarbone felt suddenly as if it were on fire, and he winced into the pain as he struggled and gasped for air that just wouldn’t come. Then, he started to cough.

A sharp smack between his shoulder blades told him Coach Finstock had arrived on the scene, because only he could pull such a move on a violently coughing student and consider it some form of helpful.

“Alright, who let Bilinski choke on my watch?” Stiles heard Coach accuse loudly, still patting Stiles on the back way harder than necessary as Stiles struggled to breathe around the overwhelming taste of blood—and flowers?—as it surged up his throat. “You’re high schoolers! You’re not supposed to need watching all the time.”

“It’s Stilinski, Coach,” Danny offered, like Stiles hadn’t been on the lacrosse team for all four years of his high school career.

“What? Oh—right, yeah, Stilinski.” He stopped patting for a moment, looking confused. “Then why does it say Bilinski on the class roster? I thought I was using the wrong name this whole time!”

“You mean the one you spilled coffee on and had to re-write some of the names?” Danny replied with a shrug, then looked pointedly at Stiles as he continued to act like he was drowning on air. Coach started his patting again and kept the unhelpful motion going right up until Stiles turned and vomited onto the floor, then he was suddenly up against the lockers away from Stiles and likely rethinking his life choices.

Stiles pressed himself against the bench he’d been using to keep from collapsing against the floor and struggled to breath. His mouth was flooded with the taste of copper and something sour, and his throat felt raw in a way it hadn’t since that one time he’d nearly screamed his vocal chords to shreds while running away from one of the many big-bad-and-scaries his current group of friends had a habit of attracting. Scott held Stiles’ arms like a lifeline. Stiles could feel the way he was forgetting his strength in his panic, and knew the press of his fingers was going to leave bruises.

It took a beat for Stiles to look down at the floor. When he did, he didn’t understand what it was he was seeing at first, but it didn’t take long for his vision to nearly go white with a surge of panic as the sight registered. He could feel his pulse in his fingertips where they clung to the wood of the bench, and his heartbeat thundered in his ears.

“What the hell is that, Stilinksi?” Coach asked in that pained way he sometimes did, sounding exactly like he didn’t sign up for this and the inquiry was only a byproduct of his job integrity.

Scott looked at Stiles in horror, but Stiles barely noticed. He was too busy staring at the mess he’d made on the floor, his mind racing with the wonder of, firstly, just what exactly he’d gotten himself into this time and, secondly, just how long exactly it would take to kill him.

Because on the floor of the locker room, coated in blood, was a single flower petal.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let’s just ignore the fact this chapter more than doubles the word count. I genuinely didn’t mean for it to.


	4. Chapter 4

“ _Narcissus poeticus_ ,” said Deaton, lifting his head from the table. “More commonly known as a white daffodil.”

Stiles, Allison, Scott, Lydia, and Isaac all stared at him from the cold comfort of the veterinary clinic. Being on the lacrosse team himself, Isaac had not been far behind when the commotion of Stiles’ incident made its way throughout the locker room, and Lydia had been with Allison when Scott, of course, called her first thing while Coach Finstock forced Stiles to the nurse’s office.

Deaton was examining the petal Stiles had puked up just a few hours ago, now washed of blood to show a white, fat shape. He had been their first stop directly out of the school’s parking lot, and he’d been just as bewildered with the story as they’d been.

“Okay,” Lydia said when Deaton didn’t say more. “And that means?”

“It seems Stiles has been cursed.”

The staring intensified. Stiles’ mouth dropped open. Isaac and Allison shared a confused glance.

“When the f—” Stiles started, then half-choked on a surge of iron-tainted florals that flooded his mouth. He quickly slapped a hand over it just in case something decided to show itself.

Scott’s and Isaac’s heads immediately snapped to look at him, both with a look of mild alarm, but Stiles waved them off with his free hand.

“When would that have happened?” Lydia asked for him, reluctantly tearing her gaze away again. “We haven’t encountered anything with that level of competence in a long time.”

Deaton shook his head. “That’s the part that I don’t understand. If he made someone angry enough to curse him, when did it happen? Everything’s been relatively quiet lately, and the last incident had been with pixies.”

“Which aren’t capable of that degree of magic,” Lydia concluded. Deaton nodded his head once in confirmation.

Stiles groaned. “Why me? Why not, I don’t know, Scott? Scott pisses people off just as often as I do!” It was an obvious lie; Stiles and his mouth were well-known not only within Beacon Hills but also within the entire police force thanks to his constant calls to the station, and the looks he got in return from everyone in the room made sure he knew it. He grumbled, “Okay, _sometimes_ Scott is more appealing than me. Maybe especially when I would want to be the appealing one! That doesn’t mean I’m the obvious choice to get cursed with—whatever the hell this is.”

“You’re just mad they liked me better at that gay club,” Scott muttered.

Stiles’ mouth dropped open. “Would you stop bringing that up!”

“Not until you stop bringing up the pool thing.”

“The pool thing is on an entirely different level than the gay club thing and you know it!”

“So, Stiles was cursed at some point. Why would he be throwing up a daffodil petal, of all things?” Lydia asked, throwing them both a look that explicitly asked them to please shut the hell up.

Deaton tilted his head, and, just like that, Scott and Stiles and their argument were fully dismissed. “The same reason it came with blood, I suppose. What that might be exactly, however, I’m not sure. I’m not all that familiar with cursework.”

“And there’s nothing else it could be?”

Deaton’s brow furrowed in thought. “Unless he ingested something questionable, no, I’m not sure what else could cause such a reaction.”

Allison, who had been completely silent the entire time, bit her thumbnail and finally said, “That witch said something about flowers, remember?”

Everyone whirled on her. Her eyes darted between them like she was sizing them up on reflex.

“What witch?” Lydia asked carefully.

“The one from that coven we took care of last year.” Releasing her nail from her teeth, she jabbed the thumb in Scott’s direction. “You know, the ones that were trying to get the werewolf blood? She attacked Stiles and started yelling about flowers.”

“The necklace,” Deaton said in realization.

“The necklace?” Isaac and Scott repeated in perfect unison, watching as Deaton vanished into his office.

“We thought she might have cursed you, remember?” Allison said. “But when nothing happened, we dropped it pretty quick.”

“That all happened last year, though,” replied Stiles bitterly. “Who the hell curses someone with something that takes a whole year to work? And what would a necklace have anything to do with it?”

“Maybe it wasn’t her,” Isaac offered quietly, but was overshadowed by Deaton reappearing.

“I’ll need to look into curses again now that we know some of the symptoms,” Deaton said as he came back into the room, his hand fisted and held their way. He uncurled his fingers to show the black and gold pendant, shaped like a flower Stiles didn’t know the name of.

“Symptoms,” Stiles repeated wrly. “Like I have the flu or something and not puking up random flower petals out of nowhere.”

Deaton ignored him. “Take this and see what you can find with it. Maybe it has some significance to the witch or the curse. I’ll start contacting others and try to pinpoint just what you’ve been cursed with.”

“Great,” Stiles muttered sarcastically, accepting the necklace. “Just what I needed. More homework.”

* * *

Deaton promptly sent them out of the clinic with the necklace and less than they had hoped to get wisdom-wise, knowing Stiles had the tendency to pull up enough random information while Googling through the abyss of the internet to compile something Lydia would usually be able to decipher.

They called Derek on the way, and Derek told them to meet up that night at the loft, where he’d be when he was done with whatever he was doing. He’d only just got the gist of what was going on when Scott had frantically called him while Stiles sat in the school’s nurse’s office and tried to beg off a hospital visit, and Derek had told them to go to Deaton. Stiles hadn’t had the chance to tell him “No shit, where else would we go?” and he regretted that chance immensely when they called Derek a second time and informed him Deaton had not been a whole lot of help, only to find out he’d sent Peter and Cora out to scrounge up potential recent magical happenstances that might have not come up on their radar yet. If they had known Derek was helping, they probably would have skipped Deaton altogether.

“We wouldn’t have gotten the necklace then,” Allison pointed out when Stiles vocalized this.

“Because the necklace is clearly of vital importance to whatever the hell is happening to me,” Stiles retorted snarkily.

“What necklace?” Derek said through the speaker phone, and Isaac proceeded to recount the whole incident where Stiles had unceremoniously been stabbed by the witch with said necklace before being ashed. “Shit,” Derek grumbled once Isaac had finished. “I’m going to cancel the meeting tomorrow. We need to figure this out.”

“Meeting?” Allison, who wasn’t privy to the fact the house was going to be warded, asked.

Stiles opened his mouth to give her his best rant on the topic, the same one he’d annoyed Scott with various times earlier that day, only for the breath to catch in his throat and the increasingly-familiar taste of pennies and flowers to surge into his mouth.

“Pull over,” he croaked, and everyone in the vehicle snapped their attention to his direction.

Lydia didn’t ask twice, she only jerked the wheel to the side and slid them up to the curb. Stiles didn’t wait for them to stop moving before throwing the door open and spilling out onto the sidewalk, where he unceremoniously dropped on all fours and started to hack up a whole ass flower. It wasn’t the most attractive move he’d ever pulled in his life, and he was thankful Lydia had already seen him much worse.

It took him a long moment to realize Scott and Isaac had followed him out, the latter standing by the sidelines and watching for passerby and the former holding onto Stiles’ shoulders like he expected Stiles to collapse. Thankfully, he did no such thing, despite the way his head started to swim the second he realized what he’d done.

“Ah,” he said weakly, staring at the blood-flecked purple bloom. “That’s new.”

Another set of shoes hitting the pavement behind him told Stiles either Allison or Lydia had followed, and, for once in his life, he kind of hated that he was creating a spectacle of himself. Something white appeared in the edges of his vision, and he startled away from it before realizing it was a tissue with Allison was on the other end of it, looking worried.

“Thanks,” he croaked and accepted the tissue, pushing away from the flower and allowing Allison, armed with another tissue, to take his place. She gingerly picked it up.

“Hyacinth,” she said immediately, holding the tissue in both hands and inspecting the contents. “They usually grow in clusters, but I’d know that flower anywhere. They used to grow in our garden a few towns ago.”

“ _Figure it out_ ,” Stiles heard Derek say, his voice half a snarl, from the phone Lydia was now holding. The phone beeped as the call ended, and Lydia set the phone down on the center console. She looked shaken as they all climbed back into the car, and they all kept a close eye on him as they continued on their way to Stiles’ house. To the point where if Stiles so much as coughed Lydia was already half-pulled over and Allison was wrenching a tissue from her purse. He had to refrain from yelling at them the third time it happened, and failed to the fourth, but his irritation didn’t do much more than stop Lydia from her driving pattern.

All in all, it didn’t do anything for Stiles’ nerves, but he made it to the house without another incident, so he had to count the wins where he could get them. His dad wasn’t home when they got there, either, and Stiles had to count that one, too. Because the last thing he needed was to explain to his dad—someone who was still blissfully unaware of the supernatural—why his son was suddenly spewing daisies.

They congregated in his room, tossed the necklace on his desk, and proceeded to stare at it for a good fifteen minutes to absolutely no avail. Stiles debated bailing and rummaging around the fridge at least twice over in that short span, but the look on Lydia’s face each time he so much as glanced in the direction of the door stopped him from acting.

“It just looks like a necklace to me,” Isaac finally grumbled, turning away. Stiles gave him a pointed nod, but he didn’t see it. Scott did, and he only shrugged.

Already annoyed with the whole endeavour, Stiles wandered away from the desk towards his bed, hands fisted in his hair. Scott followed not far behind. It didn’t take long for Lydia to bark at them for loitering around and being useless, which, okay, technically they totally were. But what did Lydia expect?

“Can’t I just stand here and look pretty?” Stiles asked, batting his eyes. “I’m the one suffering, after all.”

“No,” Lydia immediately shot back. “You wanted to be part of the brains, Stiles, you’re going to live up to that position. The sooner we figure this out, the sooner we can get the curse removed.”

“I miss Jackson, he would understand,” Stiles grumbled, then smacked his hand across his mouth in horror. “I can’t believe I just said that.”

Scott stared at Stiles like he didn’t know who he was. “I can’t believe you just said that and it wasn’t a lie.”

Stiles clutched his stomach. “I think I feel a little sick.”

“Could you two stop being dramatic and get back over here, please?” Lydia called out, effectively stopping Scott dead in his tracks just as he was reaching for the wastebasket to further the joke. Allison smiled at them, and Isaac looked a little put out, though Stiles didn’t bother wondering why.

“There has to be something about this,” Lydia continued in frustration once they were sufficiently paying attention.

“No, Lydia, there doesn’t!” Stiles threw back. “It’s just a piece of jewelry that the witch got stabby with. She _spoke_ the curse, the whole stabbing part was probably just a distraction.”

But Lydia shook her head, her hand pressed against her mouth. After a moment, she removed it enough to say, “Something about it feels— _off_. It’s not just a necklace.”

Stiles rolled his eyes. “Just because it feels a little funky doesn’t mean it’s anything special.”

“There’s no reason to immediately ignore it when we have no other leads.”

“Deaton is looking into it! We have symptoms, as he liked to call them. He can figure it out himself with that. That’s his job!”

“Actually, it’s not really,” Isaac interjected, and Stiles threw him a glare that he only raised his eyebrows in response to.

“I just think we’re barking up the wrong tree with this,” Stiles said slowly, not once taking his eyes off of Isaac. Isaac looked distinctly unimpressed.

“ _I_ think—” Lydia started to say, then was interrupted before she could finish.

“Guys?” Allison called out, effectively stopping the bickering cold. All eyes turned to her, where she was leaning over the messy expanse of Stiles’ desk, her dark hair pooling on its surface next to the necklace. “There’s a latch on this thing.”

“What?” Lydia said hurriedly, rushing around Scott, Isaac, and Stiles to Allison’s side. Allison leaned out of the way just enough for Lydia to drop her head and look. When she lifted her head again, she was scowling, her fingers already picking the pendant up and holding it against the dim illumination of Stiles’ only bedroom light. “How did we miss that?”

“It was pretty dirty when we gave it to Deaton,” Allison offered.

“Excuse me for getting blood all over it. I’ll be more careful next time,” Stiles grumbled, but was ignored.

Scott took a step towards Lydia, who, with Allison, was still squinting up at the pendant as Lydia turned it precisely with her fingers. With just the right turn in the light, Stiles saw it.

On the edges of two of the petals were tiny hinges, and in the very center of the black bloom was a circular latch, barely bigger than a pinhead, that blended nearly seamlessly into the design. The only reason they could see it at all was because of the way Lydia was holding it in the light, casting just the right shadow onto the center to bring the latch into relief.

“How do we open it?” asked Isaac.

Instead of answering, Lydia tilted the necklace against the dying ray of sunlight that streamed into Stiles’ room from the window. He couldn’t see exactly what she was doing, but after a moment her mouth popped open slightly around a silent gasp and the familiar wrinkle Stiles knew so well formed between her eyebrows.

“Allison,” she whispered, like she could scare away whatever she was seeing. She didn’t move a muscle, but Allison scrambled until she was directly behind her, chin on her shoulder, eyes squinting to see what Lydia saw.

“I see it,” Allison said immediately, then slowly reached her hand out, fingers curled into her palm and thumb out.

“What’s she doing?” Scott asked Isaac, who was closest to the two.

Isaac hesitated, head cocking as he watched, then said, “Sticking her nail in it?”

Then the necklace popped open, and they all let out a collective breath. Lydia’s arms dropped, allowing the necklace to clatter back into the desk.

“Jesus,” Stiles muttered, like he hadn’t also been holding his breath in anticipation. “You’d think we’d just defused a bomb.”

Scott smacked his hand against Stiles’ arm, but he was grinning.

“There’s something written here,” Lydia said faintly after a moment, her head already bowed over the open pendant.

“Of course there is!” Stiles groaned, because, naturally, he _had_ to be wrong about the necklace being of any importance.

“What does it say?” Scott asked.

“It’s—not in English. Do we have paper?” Lydia glanced up from pendant suddenly, looking between every party member crammed in the room before settling on Stiles, who launched into motion, tearing things out of his drawers in search of paper. “And a pen?” she added on when Stiles stood up again, a notepad labeled “Chemistry” held up in victory. Stiles tossed Scott the notepad and started looking around for a pen. Once a pen was also secured, they both were given over to Lydia’s waiting hands. She slapped them on the table and immediately got to work.

Glancing between the pendant and the paper, Lydia quickly wrote out the faint words inscribed on the inside of the pendant. They all loomed over her, watching as she hastily scrawled out:

_Morgên y Dylwythen_

“The hell does that mean?” Stiles said from the huddle they’d become, pressing his face closer and tilting his head like it would help him read the words to better clarity. It did not.

Allison pushed Stiles’ face away when it got close enough to nearly touch cheeks with hers. “It looks like a name, doesn’t it?”

“Or a place?” said Isaac.

Lydia mumbled something under her breath and broke away from the group for the laptop sitting innocently on Stiles’ bed. Stiles only had a second to pray he hadn’t left anything incriminating up before Lydia was wrenching it open and booting it awake, her pleated skirt flouncing around her as she sat down on Stiles’ bed and pulled the laptop into her lap. Her fingers started typing rapidly across the keyboard.

“King Arthur?” Scott repeated, apparently having heard whatever Lydia muttered. _Werewolves_. “Like, _Merlin_ and King Arthur, _that_ King Arthur?”

When Lydia didn’t answer immediately, Scott looked to Stiles. Stiles only shrugged.

“And Morgana,” Lydia concluded after a moment, turning the laptop around to show a picture of a woman in flowing robes, her hair a maelstrom around her. “Morgan le Fay.”

“Why does that name sound so familiar?” Scott asked, but quietly, like he was asking himself.

Lydia sighed. “She’s an ancient sorceress from mythology.”

“Why would her name be on the inside of an old necklace?” Isaac asked, his hand anchored on the corner of Stiles’ desk like he hadn’t figured out where in the room he was supposed to be and decided on a whim that there, right there, was good enough.

“Maybe it belonged to her?” Allison offered.

“Maybe it still belongs to her,” tried Scott, snapping his fingers. “Maybe our witch stole it or something.”

“Right,” Stiles agreed. “Sorceress. Chances are she never actually died, right? Powerful magic people don’t die. Isn’t that, like, a forefrontal issue when it comes to them?” He paused. “Does that mean Merlin might still be alive, too?”

Isaac frowned, blinking his confusion like it was morse code. “None of those people were actually real.”

“Like werewolves aren’t actually real?” Lydia challenged, one eyebrow raised. Isaac pursed his lips and shut up.

“We need to take this back to Deaton,” Scott said, already pulling his phone out. Lydia was right behind, ripping the paper out and stuffing it in her pocket, before rethinking the action and scooping the necklace up.

“Stiles,” she ordered, holding it out. Stiles took it without question.

“What about Derek?” Isaac asked as Lydia started marching out of Stiles’ room, keys flashing in her hand, Allison not far behind. Scott looked up from his phone. “He wanted us to go to his loft tonight to talk about what happened,” Isaac reminded him.

“Oh, right,” Scott replied, though he didn’t sound like he cared much that he forgot about Derek. That irked something deep in Stiles’ gut, but, like most things when it came to Scott’s relative negligence of anything he considered an outlier worth caring about, Stiles pushed the feeling aside.

“We’ll call him on the way,” said Stiles, and if it was through slightly gritted teeth, no one called him out on the fact.

Scott nodded, pocketing his phone again, already moved on. “Texted Deaton, he knows we’re coming.” Scott eyed Stiles for a moment. “Not feeling flower-barfy after all of that?”

Stiles made a face. “Ew, man, don’t call it that.”

“I’m calling it as I see it. You didn’t answer my question.”

“No, weirdly enough, I feel fine. Maybe the necklace _doesn’t_ have anything to do with it.”

Scott and Isaac shared a glance, and Stiles had to fight not to make rude commentary on the fact they thought he was being Stiles again.

“Well, let’s go,” Isaac said, like he ever was in charge of anything. “Probably not a good idea to wait around with this. We don’t know how much time we have to waste.”

“Maybe we’ll get lucky for once and this will kill me slowly,” Stiles said jovially.

“Stop making a joke of it,” Scott grumbled as he started to walk out the door, but Isaac stopped him with a hand on his arm before Stiles could offer a choice retort. Stiles snapped his jaw shut and watched.

Isaac held Scott’s gaze for a long moment; long enough that Stiles suddenly felt like he was intruding on something, and it wasn’t the usual alpha-beta shit he deliberately shoved himself into just to reaffirm his claim on the title of “Scott’s best friend.” Scott nodded his head once, minutely, and they turned away from each other at the same time, and suddenly it was like whatever intimate thing Stiles had thought he was witnessing had never actually happened.

They walked out the door, one after the other, and Stiles lingered behind feeling like there was something big he just completely missed.

* * *

“Morgana,” Deaton said as he held the pendant up, the steril light of the office catching off the metal. Stiles thought he looked distinctly uncomfortable saying the name.

“You know her?” Lydia asked, her arms crossed and her head cocked.

Deaton sighed. “Every druid knows of Morgan le Fay. Most hope never to meet her.” When they all only stared at him, waiting for more, he set the pendant down on the examination table. “Sorcery is a very powerful kind of magic. Very different from the kind druids dabble in. Morgan is the mother of sorcery, and meeting her means you either did something very right or very wrong.”

“But we didn’t do anything at all,” said Scott. “Another witch cursed Stiles. Her name is inside the necklace, that’s all.”

Deaton looked down at the table for a heartbeat before looking at Scott. “Why do you think her name is inside the necklace?”

“Beeeecause it belongs to her?” Stiles tried. He shot Lydia a wary glance and was not comforted to find she didn’t look any more assured. Then, it clicked. “Oh no,” he said in slight panic. “She’s going to think _we_ stole it.”

“She may not,” Deaton corrected quickly. “But she also may not care either way.”

The air in the room went ridged with intensity and silence as the realization made its way between them. It was Allison who finally asked, “What are we going to do?”

“Well,” Deaton sighed, pushing away from the table, “seeing as Stiles is cursed with something from a witch with some kind of connection to Morgana, we have little choice but to take a chance in either direction.”

Stiles’ mouth went dry. “We either find her and hope she doesn’t kill all of us or wait to see if the curse goes away on its own.”

“But that could kill you,” Scott challenged.

“Which means there isn’t really a choice,” Isaac followed directly behind. “We have to find this Morgana lady.”

Stiles fought the urge to roll his eyes at Isaac, but didn’t miss the way Lydia did the same before she said, “Where would she be right now?”

“Europe, I’m sure,” said Deaton. “Most ancient legends prefer to stay in the place where they are most remembered.”

“How are we going to contact someone across the ocean?” asked Allison.

And when Deaton smiled, Stiles knew immediately they were about to pay a price they didn’t want. “We have a connection.”

“Who?” Scott asked, but it was Lydia who answered.

“Jackson,” she said quietly. “You’re going to call Jackson.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi guys! Sorry for the wait, I ended up taking part in NaNoWriMo this year so October and November were full of prepping and writing my own stuff. This chapter was also originally one chapter, but has been broken into two due to length, so anticipate a slightly chonky one coming next.
> 
> Also! Please take note of the updated tags. I’ve got more of the later plot fleshed out and some … _things_ … came up. I don’t want anyone getting caught off guard by a trigger! If you’re worried at all, feel free to shoot me a message on Tumblr for more details. (If you don’t want spoilers and don’t mind potentially triggering things, though, go ahead and totally ignore the tags.)
> 
> I also apologize profusely if it takes me forever to finish this fic. I know we’re only 5 chapters in right now, but I am in very deep plot-wise and there’s a lot left to come. I just have to figure out how to connect all of these dots I’ve created. Where’s Shane Madej when you need him.

Jackson, in true Jackson fashion, took for-fucking-ever to call back.

Thankfully, somehow, between the time it took to call Jackson and for Jackson to bother to call back, Stiles had managed to get off relatively scot-free in the flower-hurling department, as Scott so lovingly continued to call it, much to Stiles’ annoyance. He only had a few crucial moments and, much like the moments that had preluded the first upheaval, they could be pinpointed exactly, even if Stiles still couldn’t quite figure out the why behind them. They could be pinpointed exactly because, well, it’s kind of hard to miss the act of throwing up flowers. And it was _always_ flowers, which didn’t make a lick of damn sense to Stiles. What was the point of regurgitating florals, of all things she could have cursed him with?

(At least it wasn’t slugs, he told himself later. It didn’t make him feel _that_ much better about it, though. Slugs were disgusting, but at least they were lubricated. Flowers were scratchy, even with all the blood, and they hurt coming up.)

The first time had been behind the bleachers during lacrosse practice, also during a hastily-made attempt by Derek to hide from the school staff that usually prevailed in completely ignoring his presence—but, with the way their luck was going, would notice Derek immediately the second they so much as got a whiff of his leather jacket on the wind—after tracking down Stiles that morning and noticing he still had a strong smell of flowers and blood and needed to be kept an eye on. By Derek himself, specifically, because Isaac, Erica, and Boyd had decided to go totally rogue on him.

Derek, whose loft they had not gone to the night before like he had requested before the whole “we found a name in the necklace” thing happened and thrown one hell of a wrench into the plan, had texted Stiles on his drive over to the school, specifically because, despite having been called on the way to Deaton’s with the necklace in hand, he had no idea what the hell was going on, and not a single goddamn soul would tell him.

Why? Fuck knew, but he’d caught Stiles halfway to the school and Stiles promptly called him.

He started the conversation with a choice, “I thought you were drowning to death on flowers.”

“Good morning to you too, Derek,” Stiles replied drily, one hand maneuvering the steering wheel and the other keeping his phone pressed to his cheek. It was a practice in multitasking, and Stiles, while no master at the feat, had learned to be quite good at it. He blamed part of that on the fact something always seemed to be going wrong _specifically_ when he was driving, and he was usually the one driving everyone around in the first place. “What do you mean, you thought I was drowning to death? It’s, like, a flower here and there at most. Usually with a quarter-cup of blood at the very bloodiest. Totally not fatal.” Yet, anyway, but Derek didn’t need to know something like that.

“Well, I thought it must have been something drastic, considering I couldn’t find any of you last night.”

Stiles pulled his phone away from his face specifically to frown down at it. “What are you talking about? We went to Deaton’s, just like we told you while we were driving there, and then we all went home after. We—” He hesitated as he caught sight of a familiar black car parked by the curb just before the turn into the school. “Are you _here_?” he accused, pitch rising. “Dude! You could have waited until we wrapped up for the day.”

“No one was answering my calls,” Derek ground out. “I didn’t know what was going on. For all I knew, you went to Deaton and keeled over and the reason I couldn't get through to anyone was because they were taking you somewhere you could be examined without freaking out hospital staff.”

It was a fair assumption, as weird as it was, Stiles had to give him that. With all the crazy shit that had been happening over the past few years, Stiles needing to be fast-tracked to some shaman or whatever because he was dying by the daffodil was not really the strangest thing Derek could have come up with when presented with utter radio silence. If fact, it kind of made a lot of sense.

“Seriously?” Stiles whined all the same. “Deaton was supposed to call you and catch you up. Hell, you could have made Isaac or Erica find you and tell you, I know you have the power.” Pulling his Jeep into a parking space, he pulled the phone away long enough to check his call log before he crammed the phone back against his cheek. “That was a total lie. You never called me.”

Derek muttered something too low for Stiles’ ears to pick up, then said, “Again, thought you were dying. Besides, it’s not on you to be the informant all the time. You’re not even in my pack.”

Stiles scoffed. “I’m so used to being the liaison at this point that I wouldn’t even notice if you had called because no one else picked up. That’s kind of a running issue around here.”

Again, Derek grumbled something too quiet for Stiles’ human hearing to understand, but he decided he agreed with whatever it was regardless, so he didn’t demand Derek repeat it. Instead, he told Derek to meet him in the field so Stiles could give him the rundown that everyone else was apparently too otherwise occupied to do.

“And, for the love of god, be _subtle_ about it,” Stiles hissed pointedly, remembering all the times Derek had stood right out in the goddamn open, clad in all black, and somehow miraculously went unnoticed most of the time. The last thing they all needed was for this to be the single time someone caught sight of a man too old to still be in high school lurking around and staring at the students and actually did something about it.

If Derek said anything in response, Stiles didn’t hear it as he shoved his phone away and half-ran around the school to the playing field. It was pure luck he didn’t run into anyone else along the way, because usually Isaac and Erica specifically were always exactly where Stiles didn’t want them to be.

(Then again, Isaac was also in the “not answering Derek’s calls” department, so maybe he was avoiding his kind-of-alpha at the moment. Erica, though? Usually went totally rogue no matter the circumstances, so that one Stiles could still count as lucky.)

Derek was leaning against the silver railing when Stiles careened his way around to him, his lacrosse stick bouncing so wildly with his movement that his heel nearly kicked it up into the back of his skull when it connected during a particularly high stride. Derek only watched, both eyebrows raised and clearly unimpressed, as Stiles struggled to right himself mid-step and keep from literally eating dirt.

“I thought we told you to stop lurking around the high school like a creep,” Stiles hissed as he unceremoniously yanked Derek behind the bleachers.

“I told you—” Derek started at a growl, but was immediately cut off.

“I know, no one was answering, but you have got to stop coming here. You don’t even look your own age, never mind like a high schooler! You could get in so much shit if you got caught, dude. You don’t need that added onto your already dubious record.”

Derek leveled him with a burning glare. “It’s not my fault _someone_ reported me for murdering my own sister.”

Stiles winced. That was, in fact, _his_ fault. Something he frequently forgot, mostly out of shame.

“Okay,” he digressed quickly, “we’re not going to stand here and argue about something that happened when I was sixteen and stupid—”

“Are you implying you’re any smarter now?” Derek cut in drily before Stiles could get to the subject-changing part of his statement. Stiles glowered at him, but he only raised his eyebrow like he was daring Stiles to contradict him.

“I’m eighteen, I have to be smarter,” Stiles huffed, hiking his backpack up higher on his shoulder. “Not like Dad’s going to get me out of things that I could go to jail for now that I’m legal and afraid.” He shook his head quickly, waving both hands in front of him as if dispelling whatever Derek might have said, assuming he was going to bother saying anything at all. “Besides the point, Derek! I have to go to class, and I’m clearly not dying right now. You just have assholes for packmates, and you know now even if you think I’m dying, you should probably call me to confirm it. Just to be on the safe side. Are we good? Can I go to class now?”

Derek rolled his eyes dramatically. “This is so stupid.”

“Hey,” Stiles said blithely, turning away to leave the premises. “You picked them. Not my fault you let your heart guide the way when it has a track record of having terrible taste in people.” He paused and twisted around, one finger already at the ready to point at Derek sternly. “Don’t go creeping around campus all day, also. I don’t want to see you creeping out the classroom windows again. Go grocery shopping or something.”

“I am not going grocery shopping. I just did that.”

Stiles closed his eyes like he was in pain. Why did it have to be him? “Okay,” he said slowly, “then go do something else. Yell at Deaton for being a dick, or get some more of those really good danishes from Cora’s work. I don’t know. Just don’t stay here. I’ll call you after I finish practice and we can gather everyone together and go high-profile parental on their asses.”

Derek eyed Stiles like he was speaking another language. “I’ll leave while you’re in class, but I’m coming back for practice. You smell like blood; I don’t like it and I want to be here if something happens, since everyone’s decided they won’t want to bring me into the loop themselves.” He had chosen to state all of this in a very firm tone, like he (wrongly) expected there to be no room for argument. For once, though, Stiles was going to let him have this one, because the warning bell had started echoing menacingly across the lawn, and he couldn’t take another tardy on his record.

With a spit curse, he twisted on his heel and started booking it across the lawn, only turning back long enough to yell at Derek, “Just don’t be creepy about it, for the love of god!”

He knew it wasn’t very likely Derek would change his mind about sticking around in the time between Stiles’ first class at the start of the day and his lacrosse practice at the end, but a guy could hope, and no one had ever bothered stopping Stiles from hoping for the implausible.

* * *

Come practice, Coach Finstock made him sit on the bench for the entire session. It wouldn’t be unusual if it were a game, but, considering they were only at practice, Stiles couldn’t help but be entirely put out and even kind of annoyed at the executive decision, especially when Coach kept throwing him glances the entire time like he was expecting Stiles to suddenly drop to all fours and start spewing bouquets.

(Okay, maybe it was actually the blood he was worried about. He likely didn’t even register the flower petal so much as the blood it was covered in. That didn’t make Stiles any less frustrated. He got enough one-on-one with the bench during games; he didn’t need the extra alone time with the damn thing.)

And, though he knew it was unlikely Derek had dipped at any point during practice, especially with the way Isaac looked distinctly uncomfortable the second he’d stepped out on the grass and kept throwing glances at the same section of bleachers Stiles had left Derek behind, Stiles kept right on hoping he hadn’t bothered coming back until halfway through practice when he finally caught a flash of black leather moving through one of the levels of the metal seats, followed by a flash of blue that Stiles had no hope of misidentifying as anything other than Derek’s werewolf flashy eyes.

Derek met Stiles’ eyes briefly through that slim opening, for no longer than a fraction of a heartbeat, and Stiles realized, yeah, he absolutely had no right expecting anything else.

What he had the right _not_ to expect, though, was the burning sensation that started in his stomach, followed quickly by the wash of metal and flowers in his mouth, the second Derek broke eye contact and vanished back into the shadows. Stiles’ hand slapped across his mouth on instinct.

What the hell? Why now? He’d been fine _two seconds_ ago. This was ridiculous!

Daring a panicked glance in Coach’s direction, Stiles was relieved to find him too busy yelling at Scott for doing something to notice Stiles’ careless knee-jerk reaction. He took the moment of distraction and nearly vaulted off of the bench, half-running his way to where Derek was hiding with his hand still pressed firmly to his mouth, then winced so sharply at the pain that suddenly started up above his collarbone that he tripped the rest of the way behind the bleachers and landed hard on his knees less than a foot away from Derek’s shoes.

Huh. Derek wore Nikes. Stiles had never noticed that before.

“Stiles,” Derek barked in alarm, already crouching down and grabbing one of Stiles’ shoulders in a tight grip. Unfortunately for both of them, it was his left side where the pain in his collarbone was radiating outwards from, and the added pressure sent Stiles’ head spinning with static and agony. Without further prompt, he unceremoniously pushed Derek away, turned his head, and choked up a decent amount of blood—much more than his previous incidents. Derek was on him again before he’d even stopped coughing.

“What happened?” he asked sharply. “What triggered it? What were you doing?”

“ _Sitting_ ,” Stiles croaked, furious. He scrubbed the back of his hand across his mouth and glared up at Derek. “Don’t look at me like that,” he rasped. “I didn’t fucking ask for this, Derek.”

A spasm seemed to cross Derek’s infuriated expression, and his jaw clenched tight. Stiles was positive he was debating ripping Stiles’ throat out again, if only to end the problem altogether. Then, he sighed in one big rush of a noise and took Stiles’ chin in one big hand, turning his head up to face Derek directly.

“Open your eyes,” Derek ordered. Stiles complied, but he did his best to also continue glaring at Derek as he did so. “Stop _squinting_ , Stiles,” Derek told him, annoyed, and Stiles ceased the glaring attempt. He released him a beat later, but not until he’d stared Stiles down with a frankly nerve-wracking level of intensity and not a single blink of relief. “No signs of blood poison, and your pupils aren’t blown out. No yellowing, no disfiguration.” He huffed again, rocking back on his heels. One of Stiles’ shoulders was still in his grip, making Stiles sway slightly with the action. “I don’t understand.”

“Welcome to the club,” Stiles groused, pushing Derek’s hand off again. He glanced down at the blood on the ground sourly. He didn’t notice the tiny yellow flower until he was looking away, and then he did a double-take.

“What?” Derek’s hand grasped onto Stiles again, though this time wrapping around his upper arm as Stiles twisted on his knees and bent down to look closer at the flower.

“I don’t know shit about flowers,” he groaned, gesturing at the thing vehemently. Derek frowned and bent over to join Stiles. He recoiled immediately.

“What _is_ that?”

“Derek, I _literally_ just said I don’t know shit about flowers. It could be some kind of carnation for all I know.”

Derek ignored that. “When did you start with the flowers?” he asked instead, pushing in again to stare down where it lay in the puddle of blood that was slowly seeping into the earth. “I thought it was one small petal thing. That’s what it was when Scott called me asking what to do.”

Stiles blinked over at Derek, frowning suspiciously. “Seriously? No one explained any of this to you at all?”

Derek only raised his head to stare back, both eyebrows raised in a “duh, I was not lying, asshole” kind of expression.

Stiles pinched the bridge of his nose. “Remember when I caused a scene while we were calling you yesterday?”

Derek’s expression hadn’t changed. “You say that like you’re not always causing a scene,” he pointed out.

“Oh my god,” Stiles groaned. “Can you be a bitch later, please? It was a full flower yesterday,” he explained when Derek only gave Stiles a vague head jerk in response to his request. “No idea what caused the change.”

“Fantastic,” Derek grumbled, inspecting the flower one last time before standing back up again. He held out a hand for Stiles, and Stiles took it.

“The sooner Jackson gets off his pretty ass and hooks us up, the sooner we can get over this and move onto the next big calamity life has in store,” declared Stiles as he brushed the grass from his knees.

Derek looked distinctly put out by that. “Pessimist,” he accused.

Stiles flashed him a grin. “You can’t talk.” He pointed to the blood patch. “Do me a favor and snap that for Deaton. My phone’s back in the locker room.”

Giving the blood a disgusted look Stiles didn’t take to heart, Derek complied. “I’ll tell him we’re coming by after you finish practice.”

“What?” Stiles said in surprise. “Why? There’s nothing we can do until we hear from Jackson. It’s not like we can summon someone we aren’t totally sure is around. _No_ , Derek,” Stiles barked quickly when Derek immediately looked thoughtful at the idea of trying to summon Morgan. “We are not opening that can of worms. I’m putting my foot down.”

He actually stomped his foot for emphasis. Derek snorted a laugh, but cocked his head in a way that told Stiles he was complying to his demands.

“I think your coach is looking for you,” he said, and, when Stiles snapped his head around to look, Finstock was indeed standing by the bench and looking around for Stiles, clearly annoyed by the fact he had vanished.

“Oops,” quipped Stiles. “Gotta go. Get lost before someone notices. I promise to keep you updated, okay?” Stiles told Derek when he frowned at being told to leave. “Now that I know I’m your only lifeline, I’ll handle keeping you in the loop.”

“Not your job,” Derek grumbled sourly, but turned and made his way into the background all the same. Stiles watched him go, sighed a sigh that had the sour taste of blood to it, and then went back to his bench solemnly, pouring lies and excuses along the way when Coach demanded to know where he had been.

He had a few days of a break after that. Jackson still didn’t call.

* * *

The second time was when Stiles’ Jeep had broken down later that week, and Derek had been the only one with a reliable means of transportation to help. He refused to give him a lift, though, insisting he could almost certainly fix it himself and get it back on the road in an hour, tops. Stiles had relented because one, he didn’t want to have to call his dad instead and potentially pull him out of work and then risk throwing up some questionable material in the seat of his cruiser, and, two, Derek _had_ proven himself to be decent at fixing the Jeep in the past. He’d gotten Stiles both into and out of sticky situations before with that very car, and he was the one Stiles typically went to nowadays for small fixes if only to avoid the same place where he had unfortunately gotten somewhat intimate with the floor during a rather rude encounter with Jackson in his kanima form. He tried not to revisit places that had strong bad memories, and the garage, thank you Jackson, was now one of them.

So, Derek it was.

He arrived promptly, pulling his car up behind the Jeep where it had chosen to whirr violently before sputtering to a total stop four odd miles away from Stiles’ house, where he’d been in the process of driving to at eight at night after a particularly brutal study session with Lydia, Scott, and Allison at the library, wherein Allison and Scott had dipped a scant hour into the studying to makeout in the stacks and Lydia had kept Stiles verbally handcuffed to the table as she forced him to write the essay he had not written on time on the correct subject and not just whatever his brain wanted to spew out at that given moment. Stiles barely garbled out a hello in his exhaustion, the energy drink he had unearthed from under one of his car seats in hand, opened, and half-consumed but had yet to kick in. Derek had only given him a pitying sort of look as he hauled out his tool kit and rag from the trunk of the Camaro and walked to the hood of the Jeep to get started. He said exactly nothing.

It was quiet for the fifteen minutes or so it took for the sugar and caffeine to kick in, but then Stiles had the energy he needed to run his mouth properly, and he saw no reason to spare Derek the effort of filling the night.

He slid out of the opened door and walked to Derek’s side, and leaned against the Jeep with a huff. “I could have fixed it, I just didn’t have the tools on me,” he lied, just for the sake of getting Derek to talk back. Derek’s favorite thing to do was argue with Stiles, and everyone, Stiles most of all, knew that.

“Sure you could have,” Derek replied drily, his head already deep in the guts of the Jeep’s opened hood, not taking the bait. He must have been having a good day.

“Okay, maybe I would have broken a few more things along the way in my exhaustion,” Stiles admitted, crossing his arms. “Just because I’m bad at it doesn’t mean I don’t know how to fix it.”

“Never said you didn’t,” Derek answered.

“You’re just better at it,” Stiles relented, already over the attempt when it was clear Derek wasn’t in a bad enough mood to bite back. He hesitated as he switched tracks, and Derek didn’t bother filling the pause with his own response, too busy shuffling around with the Jeep’s innards. “Is Cora any good with cars?”

Derek didn’t even give the question a beat before he was huffing a laugh and saying, “God, no. You put her near a car and she’ll run it to the ground without thinking twice about it.”

Stiles nodded thoughtfully. “Wouldn’t expect anything less, actually.”

“She got that from Peter,” Derek said. “It’s a nightmare with those two. There’s a reason I’m the one always driving the only car we legally own.”

Stiles tried to remember either Peter or Cora behind the wheel of anything other than a car he had never seen before and would never see again and had to admit he probably didn’t want to know _why_ he never saw them again. “I guess the gene had to skip somewhere. Luckily for me it wasn’t you.” He pulled a face, imagining having to stand there while Peter or Cora fixed his car for him, and didn’t get any farther in the daydream than trying to dial them and them screening him. He shuddered. “I would have died here cold and alone if it skipped you.”

“It’s fifty degrees out,” Derek pointed out annoyingly.

“ _Chilly_ and alone,” Stiles corrected.

“You’re barely five miles from home. You could have walked if forced to.”

“Really, Derek?” Stiles complained. “I’m trying to compliment you here.”

Derek lifted his head up just enough to give Stiles a look. “How was any of that a compliment?”

“I’m glad it’s you and not Peter or Cora,” Stiles explained, throwing his hands out, because, really, was it not obvious? He thought it was glaringly so. “Sure that’s, like, at least a sub-par compliment, but it’s still a compliment at the base of it.”

Derek rolled his eyes and ducked back down, something metal clattering away as he worked.

Stiles watched him for a moment, then, because he couldn’t just ignore it, quietly asked, “Was Laura good with cars?”

Derek snorted, but his fist tightened on the wrench, betraying the action. “Laura was always all over the place. She knew how to fix the Camaro, but that doesn't mean she was the one doing it. Ever.”

“I wish I had a younger sibling to bully into doing all the stuff I don’t want to do,” Stiles moaned.

“No, you don’t,” Derek said, pulling out again. He crossed his arms on the lip of the Jeep, and he took a moment to lift his head and rest his chin on the point where they overlapped, the wrench hanging loosely from his grip. A smear of grease had somehow already found its way to both his thumb and the curve of his right cheekbone, and Stiles found his attention zeroing in on them both without any effort on his part. “You enjoy being an only child. Two of you would be the same as asking for demonic activity to occur, anyway, and I bet your parents knew that.”

Stiles stuck his tongue out like the legal adult he was. “Just because you’re right doesn’t mean you have to be a jerk about it.”

“I’m a jerk about everything,” Derek pointed out blithely. Stiles had to agree, and he made a gesture with his shoulders and head that conveyed so. Derek nodded his head back once in satisfaction at being right, then pulled back from the car with a sigh. “All good now.”

“Already?” Stiles said, surprised, taking Derek’s place as he closed the hood and started making his way back to his own car. “That didn’t take nearly as long as I thought it would.”

“Some of us can talk and work efficiently at the same time.”

Stiles gave him a very pointed glare. “You’re really making me wish I had walked, you know that?”

Derek returned the glare with a shit-eating grin, but said nothing as he pulled open the driver’s side door of the Camaro with one hand. The smear of grease was still on his cheekbone, and Stiles took a small bit of malicious glee that he hadn’t noticed and wiped it off. He reveled in the feeling for a single moment, then tapped his own cheek with a finger in a gesture Derek completely missed.

“You got a little something,” Stiles continued in mild exasperation when Derek did absolutely nothing in response to the silent hint.

Derek blinked and rubbed at his cheek. “Oh,” he said quietly, like he was talking to himself. He had a strange look on his face when he looked to Stiles again. Kind of like he was seeing something he didn’t like. Which, considering he was looking at _Stiles_ , Stiles wasn’t all that distressed or surprised by the presence of something he was fairly accustomed to being on the receiving end of.

Stiles didn’t get a chance to comment on the matter, however, because no more than a second after Derek had leveled Stiles with the look, the curdling feeling burst to life in his gut, burning a hot path up the length of his throat, and, before he could even realize quite what it was he was doing, he was bent over double with his hands clutching uselessly at the Jeep’s metal-slick side and depositing a small and relatively unbloodied bell-shaped purple flower onto the wet asphalt beneath the Jeep’s tires.

Derek was again on him before Stiles could even get his footing back, this time with both hands encompassing Stiles’ shoulders and keeping him from collapsing onto the street.

He didn’t ask any stupid questions this time, much to Stiles gratitude, just held Stiles up until he stopped gasping long enough to pull away.

“Didn’t even have time to react to that one,” Stiles croaked, scrubbing his hand across his mouth.

Derek’s eyes roamed around Stiles ferociously, his expression first confused, then horrified, like the action of Stiles doing what was steadily becoming a normal occurrence was something he had not anticipated. He backed up a step, paused, and fell back into confusion again. Stiles eyed him warily.

“Earth to Derek,” he called, his throat scratchy and hoarse. “Why do you look like you’re having some kind of conniption? Share with the class.”

Derek shook his head, grumbling something about needing to figure this out before Stiles had enough flowers to open a shop. Stiles barked a startled, strained laugh at the idea of it, and Derek only gave him a look reminiscent of the kind he used to give him when he was debating just how many people would go looking for Stiles’ body if he happened to off the kid. Stiles only smiled wryly in return.

Derek forced Stiles to let him drive him home after that, though, and Stiles fumed the entire way there.

* * *

The final straw of the week, on top of everything else that had happened, was when Derek outright refused to let Stiles work on the house. Point-blank, the second he arrived on the scene and saw Stiles sitting where he always sat, his expression one that said he somehow forgot Stiles was there _every_ weekend. He didn’t even take his morning cup of coffee when Stiles held it out, only barked an order about Stiles going home and that they didn’t need him that day.

Needless to say, Stiles had absolutely not listened. He argued the matter quite vehemently, in fact, and Derek had gotten so frustrated that he absconded to the house in the middle of one of Stiles’ slapstick defense attempts at being allowed to stay.

“He doesn’t want you getting blood on the new wood,” Peter offered in that spectacularly aggravating way Peter always managed to be as Derek stomped off. He had arrived somewhere around when Stiles had argued that he was the only one who really bothered to keep everyone in line and had sat down, taken Derek's unwanted cup of Joe, and settled in to watch. “And none of us particularly want to see you showing flowers,” he continued. “You can sit on the lawn and play nice with the woodland creatures.”

“I don’t know,” Erica cut in, but, before Stiles could even scrounge up the hope that she might be backing him up, she continued, “I kind of want to see it in action.”

Stiles threw his hands out at her in a gesture universally meant to mean, “What the fuck?”

She shrugged. “Well, I do,” was all she said.

“Take a rain check, Blondie,” Peter snapped, smacking his hands together. “Cora left a list of things she wanted me to order for the house, but I have more important things to do. So” —he leveled Stiles with that slick grin that always made Stiles want to claw his eyes out for witnessing— “you can have the honors. Thank me later.”

Stiles opened his mouth, a new argument at the ready on his tongue, but Peter only rolled his eyes, turned on his heel, and walked off, all of the words Stiles actually managed to get out falling on uninterested, deaf ears. He almost threw one of the mugs at Peter’s retreating back, but thought better of it. Derek’s _Rainbow Brite_ mug deserved a better fate than that.

So, that Saturday afternoon instead found Stiles, along with Erica and Isaac, sitting on the still-wild lawn with the laptop between them, ordering all the things Cora and Lydia had come to a compromise on. It wasn’t a long list.

“How pissed off do you think Cora would be if I added a pinball machine onto the list?” Stiles mused as he clicked the button to add a top-of-the-line microwave to the digital cart. The Hales had a lot of money to burn, and Cora was sparing no expense on anything. Stiles didn’t think she’d notice if he added a few things on. When neither Erica or Isaac responded, Stiles looked up. They were noticeably ignoring him. “Come on,” he continued anyway. “How cool would it be to have a pinball machine in your kitchen? Or maybe the living room.” He paused, pressing a finger to his chin and looking at the screen again. “Maybe one for every room. You could never get bored with that many pinball machines in your house, right?”

Instead of offering useful insight on this, Erica gave him a pained look. “I can’t believe I used to have a massive crush on you.”

“To be fair,” Isaac offered, “you didn’t really know him.”

“Fuck _you_ , Isaac,” Stiles retorted.

“Not even if you asked nicely,” Isaac retorted, grinning like a little shit. Stiles punched his arm. He didn’t move an inch.

Stupid werewolves.

“It _is_ kind of a cool idea,” Isaac mock-whispered after Stiles had begrudgingly returned to his duty of adding more boring things to the cart. Erica only scoffed and punched him herself. He actually rocked in his seat that time, but he was still grinning like a little shit.

“ _Boys_ ,” Erica hissed, and Stiles politely refrained from giving her more of a reason to say that.

Cora arrived around noon with her usual peace offering of pastries, which she deposited right onto the ground next to Stiles without a word and absconded into the house to check on things. It took less than five minutes for Peter to reappear on the scene and follow her in, likely to take all the credit for the ordering of things that he had so unceremoniously put on Stiles that morning. Stiles would have immediately gone after them and ratted Peter out on his weasel tactics, but his hands were full of cherry turnovers, and it took him a moment to haul himself to his feet without the steadying help of said hands. Erica, Isaac, and Boyd, who had come out for a pastry almost the moment he heard Cora arrive, followed behind like a line of ducks, likely hoping to watch the chaos that would ensue once Stiles had swallowed everything in his mouth and regained the ability to talk coherently.

Rather than finding Peter claiming to have done his duty like the absolute asstwat he was, the house was empty as if none of the Hale members had entered at all. Stiles frowned at the others in confusion. Erica shrugged, but Boyd squinted in a vague direction before pointing off to an area of the house behind the giant staircase and leading the way there.

They found Derek, Cora, and Peter standing there just beyond the shadow of the entryway, in front of a tightly-shut door. The surface of the door was still slightly charred—one of the few solid wood doors they had yet to replace, as they were trying to replicate the same carved pattern the originals had etched in them, and it took time for the carver to churn them out. Peter and Cora looked startled from where they were just behind Derek, his brow furrowed and his eyes blank, to the point where they didn’t even look up at the intruders as Stiles and the others arrived on the scene.

Something was clearly wrong. Derek’s jaw was tense enough that the tendons stood out starkly beneath the stubbled skin. Both his hands were fisted by his hips, holding a tension Stiles didn’t understand. None of them had bothered to check on Derek since that morning when he’d told Stiles he wasn’t needed and left the scene, all too busy with tasks they had either already been doing throughout the weekends (Boyd, grouting the tile they’d laid the other day in one of the bathrooms) or had recently been assigned (Stiles, because of his flower problem, with Isaac to keep watch of him and Erica because she wanted to see it happen in person). Now, Stiles realized, maybe there had been more of a reason for Derek’s bite that morning, and maybe it had something to do with the room behind the door.

Problem was, Stiles didn’t know what the door was for. He’d never checked, and no one had ever been assigned that room. Stiles had assumed it was some kind of broom closet and left it at that.

It wasn’t until Cora turned sharply away and thundered from the house—until Peter took a step forward and rested a hand on Derek’s shoulder—that Stiles realized: this was the door to the basement.

This was the door to the room where members of his family had been trapped and killed.

Silently backing out from the scene, he shared a wordless look with Boyd, Isaac, and Erica. Some sort of agreement passed between them. They’d take care of the basement. They’d grab Scott and Lydia and Allison and they’d do everything that needed to be done. Curse be damned. The repairing of the house was one thing—but the basement was too much to demand of the remaining Hale family.

So, the next day, they got the wood. They ordered the concrete and the nails and the various things they knew Derek wouldn’t bother to check for, and they got themselves ready for a long number of work-filled weekends without Derek to guide them, Peter to aggravate them, or Cora—sitting somewhere on the scale of her brother to her uncle—to tell them what they were doing wrong. The basement would be their project, and they were ready to do it right.

And then Jackson called back.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me [on Tumblr](http://voidwaren.tumblr.com/) too, though be wary of potential spoilers for fic since I do WIP Wednesdays and/or Six Sentence Sundays.


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